Harry Potter & The Vellum Animus
by Birdie Lo Green
Summary: Harry leaves the protection of his relatives for the last time. His faith in Ron and Hermione is assured but he can trust no one else. The greater good is questioned, sacrifices are made and good men lost. Can the wizarding world hold strong against the strain of war?
1. Chapter 1 Return to Sinner's End

Chapter One- Return To Sinner's End

Draco Malfoy ran without looking back. With every step the fact sank in that he would never see Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry again and if he did it would not be in the same way. The thought was enough to make him want to keep on running until he hit the sea. He went crashing into the wrought iron gates which lined the perimeter of the grounds. The Hogwarts four founders had erected them to protect the school and its students from attack. In Draco's time they had provided defence from escaped murderers and the Dementor guards of Azkaban prison, but tonight they had failed their function and it was entirely his fault. The Dark Lord Voldemort had set Draco a seemingly impossible task with no expectations of success, simply meaning to punish his incarcerated father with the loss of a son. His other Deatheaters had bullied him, doubting his abilities at every turn. He had plotted and he had planned and against all odds it had culminated in the murder of Hogwart's greatest Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore but despite direct orders, Draco had not had the heart to do it. Dumbledore was one of the greatest wizards in the world but none of Draco's intense training had come into play. At no point did Dumbledore put up a fight. He wasn't even angry at the prospect of being murdered by a schoolboy, just conversational, even impressed with all Draco had managed to achieve. His death seemed unworthy of his status, less like cold-blooded victory and more like a tragic accident. He had made a name for himself duelling and defeating dark wizards. He should have died trapped in fierce battle. Instead he had plummeted from one of the utmost towers of the castle had championed for decades. Draco had been one of many rushing to the verge to watch him fall but not out of any morbid curiosity. He had only wanted to see the freedom of falling on his face.

* * *

Snape appeared behind Draco, prying his frozen fingers from the castle gates. His was the only face in the darkness unbroken by a smile. Draco's aunt Bellatrix was dancing but Draco could not think of any music that would mark the occasion. **"Back to the happy hell of HQ then?"** Thorfinne Rowle suggested where he was standing smiling and taking one last look at the swirling Dark Mark he had cast into the sky in Voldemort's name. Draco's last and only visit to The Riddle House had involved threats, painful invasions into his mind, snakes and torment and ultimately landed him at the gates of the place he had called home for six years with no place to go. He did not want to step over its threshold again and into the Dark Lord's domain with a mind swimming in regret. Snape was staring at him as though he meant to read his mind too. Draco instantly went rooting through his own head, throwing the night's event and the tangled feelings he had about them to the very back where no one would go looking. Snape gripped his arm and apparated them both away from the death, danger and what was left of Draco's childhood.

Throughout that childhood Draco had always known Snape, first as Godfather and then as Head of House and Potions Master at Hogwarts but in those few moments of apparition his grip on Draco's arm was tighter than necessary. Before his father's imprisonment, Snape had been the one Draco had gone to for conversation and comfort. He had educated and protected him and given him special treatment even under accusations of favouritism. Draco may not have liked him all of the time but he had never stopped respecting him. The assignment of Draco's task from Voldemort had come with conditions of silence. He was forbidden to speak of his plans to anyone and when Snape had come asking with offers of help Draco had rudely told him where to get off. He had abused his favouritism; avoiding him after classes and at weekends, skipped detentions, gotten out of bed early and even taken to sleeping elsewhere and having lunches delivered to other parts of the castle. He had done his utmost to reject the man who had vowed at his birth to do right by him no matter the circumstance. Yet the moment Draco had faltered he had stepped in. He didn't know if the grip on his arm was protection or punishment but a part of him wanted it to be the latter.

* * *

Snape's bruising grip on his arm lifted. They came to an abrupt halt, at the bottom of a hill, a gated unkempt Edwardian mansion looming over them, the windows glowing like eyes. Feeling as though he had left his stomach back at Hogwarts, Draco stumbled and threw up into some bushes. The swirling confinement of apparition had not been what Draco needed. It was a sensation too similar to the crushing pressure he had been under every day since the Dark Lord had assigned him his task. The sleepless determination to succeed, the choking fear that he couldn't possibly and the weighty knowledge that he had no choice in the matter, had eaten away at any thought of his months. It was not air he had heard rushing past his ears, but his father's voice shouting disappointments. In his name Draco had knowingly cursed an innocent girl to inches from death, poisoned and almost killed Ron Weasley, led his fellow Deatheaters into the castle under both Harry Potter nose and Snape's questioning eagle eyes, watched a werewolf feed on his fellow students without remorse and held a dying man at his mercy and the poorly built walls of his malevolence were collapsing in on themselves. He barely felt like himself anymore and what he needed was the comfort of his mother's arms.

* * *

The werewolf Greyback started laughing at him and was slapped by his aunt Bellatrix. Snape broke up their scrap and handed Draco a black handkerchief. His pale hands were shaking and Draco hoped that it wasn't just from the cold. He wanted Snape to be as shocked to the core as he was. He stood wringing his hands as Amycus Carrow drew his wife close and laughing like they had never been happier. Neither waited for him and Draco followed up the hill, out of breath in his attempts to keep up. They all passed through the gates as though made of smoke and carried on up the porch steps and into the huge estate. Draco followed through a maze of dark rooms and hallways, filled with torn, still portraits and hanging lamps, into a dimly lit room on the second floor. Wormtail's silver hand opened the door to let them in. They found the Dark Lord seated, silently at the head of a long table, before the fire, stroking a hand over the head of his great snake, Nagini like she was a warm and comforting pet. The long table seated a dozen more Deatheaters, whose crimes Draco had only read about in the Prophet. More than half of them were Azkaban escapees. Draco knew that he had to be the only person in the room who had not murdered anyone. His mother had been standing anxiously by the windows watching their approach. She came across the room to pull her son into a hug but Draco remained at the back of the pack with Snape, staring up at the ceiling. A woman was suspended over the table, her long blonde hair hanging down and her face and limbs contorted painfully. She reminded Draco too much of his mother. The patter of her blood dripping onto the table was the only sound in the crowded dining room.

Bellatrix did not bat an eyelid, simply pushing past Greyback to return to her seat between her husband Rodolphous and his brother Rabastan. **"Your mark hangs high over the old fool's warm corpse my Lord!"** she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in delight.

**"Then I must confess myself, outdone!"** The Dark Lord wasn't smiling but his hissing voice was uncharacteristically jovial. His flashing red eyes picked Draco's blonde hair out of the crowd. "**Don't be so diffident Draco."** He met his gaze and shook off the stabbing pains which meant that the Dark Lord was attempting to force his way into his thoughts. **"I'll admit after your father's antics, expectations were non-existent but you have raised the bar. You have outshone your predecessor. Bravo! Ardour and ingenuity of such calibre shall forge a place for you amongst my ranks." **Bellatrix watched his shining eyes and clasped hands intently. Draco's mother gripped the hand he was holding behind his back and kissed him lightly on the cheek. This was not the kind of paternal pride most children lived for.

**"Don't be so eager to inflate his ego my Lord,"** Greyback sniped from where he was sitting at the table, licking the woman's blood from his fingertips. **"The kid's ****_exactly_**** like his old man- couldn't follow through on his promises either."** Narcissa's face fell. **"All talk and no action clearly run in that family-"** Bellatrix shot from her seat, wand extended and Voldemort raised a hand.

**"A case of cold feet, Draco?"** His tone was condescending and Draco prepared himself for pain as Amycus Carrow nudged him forwards. **"To whom ****_do_**** I owe my undying gratitude?"** There was silence as Voldemort surveyed the inhabitants of the dining room waiting for the victor to announce themselves. Bellatrix shrank back into her seat, glaring pointedly at Greyback but every other pair of eyes were cast to a silent and brooding Snape where he was standing in front of a wall of glass cabinets filled with expensive looking china. **"Severus?"** His tone had switched to one of surprise but the cock of his head and the grip of his white, skeletal hands on the chairs arms reflected a simmering irritation.

**"My Lord, if I may?"** Snape stepped forwards, hands together like he meant to beg. Narcissa could not drag her eyes from him. **"The boy ****_would_**** have seen the task through to ****_execution_**** had I not come across him. In my haste to return to you before Order or Ministry intervention, I did not give him the proper chance to prove his worth. The point of the matter is that he held a great wizard's life in his hands. It is more than can be said of others his age."** The ensuing silence was unbearable. The intensity of Voldemort's stare meant that he was reading Snape's mind and any moment he would see the way in which Draco had lowered his wand with ease and teary eyes.

**"I trust your word Severus...though perhaps Dumbledore shouldn't have."** The Deatheaters burst into raucous laughter diffusing the tension but Draco could not relax.

**"I acknowledge that my actions defied your plans-"**Snape had been persistent in his attempts to discover Draco's plans. He had questioned him about both attacks on other students and yet never exposed or expelled him. Draco had foolishly thought that he meant to steal his glory but in seeing the ease with which he had killed Dumbledore at the tower Draco knew that he could have done so at any time.

**"Indeed and for that you will pay but I suffer to think of superior circumstances. If Draco had done the deed, Dumbledore would have mourned ****_only_**** his innocence. With you, he died drowning in throes of a bitter betrayal. It's wonderful!"** Bellatrix cackled and Greyback sniggered. There was the smallest trace of upturned lips on Snape's face. Draco failed to see a funny side. He felt on display like the china in the large airy room. There was nowhere for him to hide.

**"What of your plans for me regarding Potter? My post died with Dumbledore."** Harry Potter had chased them across the grounds without fear and with the intention of avenging his Headmaster. In the heat of that moment and the giant grounds keeper Hagrid's burning hut, Draco would have happily fallen to his knees and begged for his rival's forgiveness. When Potter had fatally attacked him in the bathroom months before, Draco had come to in a blood stained shirt with Snape at his bedside and a smothering sense of disappointment. If he had died in that bathroom he might have avoided all of this. His mother would have lost her only son to tragedy and people would have spoken only of how he was an eager student with a bright future. He now no longer had any future to speak of.

**"Forget it. I no longer require a spy within Hogwarts. Without Dumbledore at the helm, Hogwarts may not reopen and if it does it will be an open house. I will force the boy to want an end to this. He will seek me out and ****_beg_**** for death."** Voldemort had taken Potter's parents before he could walk. Last year he had lost his Godfather to Bellatrix's sadism and this year his mentor to Snape's betrayal. Draco had agreed to murder a man in exchange for his loved ones. He could not imagine the kind of revenge Potter meant to exact upon those who had robbed him of a family of his own. Like Dumbledore, Potter did not deserve the death sentence which the Dark Lord had prescribed him.

**"Oh when, my Lord, when?"** Bellatrix rose from her seat like an excitable child and the Dark Lord smiled.

**"In due time Bella. You have to play with a mouse before you kill it."**

* * *

Narcissa flinched as screams echoed into the room from another part of the house. **"Wormtail! What have I told you about keeping our guests quiet?"** Wormtail nodded fervently and left the room to quieten the faceless people in pain. His absence left the room in a silence punctuated only by the flickering of the fire as the Dark Lord stared up at the woman, suspended over the table. The ends of her hair were singed and there was a gaping bite wound on the back of her left calf which looked like the work of a vicious dog. Draco knew better and eyed Greyback with disdain. Were she to survive, the woman would become a werewolf, which was little of a life at all. **"What has our guest revealed?"**

"**The boy's security is airtight until he comes of age. Do you plan to attack on his birthday?"** Rabastan answered.

**"I'll come bursting out of the cake and tear his family to-"**Greyback's wit was cut short by Snape.

**"The boy will no doubt be moved before his birthday my Lord. Ministry contacts are futile. Potter's protection will now be entirely within the responsibilities of the Order of the Phoenix."**

**"They've got quite the mortality rate these days!"** Rabastan added and the others chuckled.

**"Then our guest would do best to indulge us of the true date and drop off point before the full moon."** The woman hanging over them screamed, her body tensing as though she was being stretched on a board. When her body returned to its contorted position, her eyes found Snape's.

**"She was...your only friend...You made Albus...a promise...He...trusted you...What would...she say?"** Her voice was weak but Snape seemed unaffected. Draco had been aware Snape was a double spy but never that he was a member of Dumbledore's secret society. He knew now that there were many things about his Godfather that he didn't know.

**"You speak when spoken to, filth!"** Bellatrix stood, her wand raised and slashing through the air. The woman's mouth clamped shut and she whimpered loudly. The Dark Lord eyed the woman and she came crashing down onto the table noisily.

**"Fenrir, return our guest to the cellar...and no nibbling."** Greyback took the woman in his arms and disappeared from the room**. "I believe celebrations are in order."** Bellatrix clapped her hands together again and threw her arms around her husband as those seated pushed out their chairs and stood. Snape made to grab Draco but the Dark Lord shook his head. **"Not you. I want the coward out of my sight-"**Narcissa gripped her son's hand again.

**"But my Lord, Draco let us into the castle under all their noses-"**

**"Your presence ought not to have been necessary. In the face of his failure, I must decline my generous offer-"**

**"You promised to release father!"** It was all Draco had dreamed about for months. His father had looked like another man entirely when he had visited him in Azkaban. His mother had been crying herself to sleep and sending tear stained letters for months. With more bad memories to deal with than the average person, his father's health was steadily failing and Draco did not want him buried in an unmarked grave at the foot of a prison.

The Dark Lord rose from his chair, seeming to glide across the room and rained a hard slap down upon Draco, knocking him back into the glass fronted cabinets and onto the floor. His mother stood helpless staring at her empty hands. **"Did that school not teach you the simple mechanisms of an exchange? Your father clearly neglected to teach you any manners or respect for your superiors! Severus had to go against ****_my_**** direct orders and dirty ****_his_**** hands for ****_you_****!"** Snape stood, silently, with an unreadable expression kicking at the broken glass at his feet. The other Deatheaters had lowered themselves back into their seats as though this was the kind of thing which entertained them. **"Narcissa, this boy has disgraced you. I want him to feel your disappointment."** His mother's eyes widened and Snape looked as though he would step in again.

**"My Lord, please-"**

**"Would you rather he felt mine?"** Narcissa stiffened, shaking her head, all eyes upon her as she approached her fallen son with her wand outstretched. Draco stared at her, bracing himself, knowing that she had no choice. She uttered the curse with such revulsion it stunned him. His entire body was doused in ice water and burning fire. Synapses firing, muscles contorting, bones stretching, skin ablaze, he grinded his teeth forcing himself not to scream. He convinced himself that his mother had shed enough tears for the pair of them. The curse was lifted after a few minutes which seemed like hours and he began to regain his breath. He padded at his clothing, sure that he had to be bleeding. He wasn't. No trace was left of the pain he had suffered but the redness in his face and the trembling wracking his body. Bellatrix took her sister by the shoulders. **"Narcissa, you astound me. Perhaps you are the Malfoy I ought to have taken on side. Your worm of a boy will remain underground. With the rain, I will graciously grant him another chance to prove his worth and earn his place amongst this circle."**

**"I can take the boy my Lord,"** Snape did not seem to want to be any part of celebrations. He pulled Draco to his feet and held him there.

**"Please let him stay-"**Bellatrix begged but the Dark Lord cut her off with a wave of his hand like she was a bothersome fly.

**"You know well the boy will be safe with me."** A strange look passed between Snape, Bellatrix and Narcissa. Bellatrix nodded and stood up, pulling her sister with her.

**"Taking out the rubbish ****_and_**** tending the children? If you aren't just the perfect little housewife-"**Rodolphous goaded and Snape started forwards with his wand raised.

**"I've killed one man tonight. I'll happily make it two!"** Voldemort gave a high pitched laugh and they separated, staring up at him.

**"Speaking of children, won't the pair of you settle? You've both endured enough petty exertion for one night. Celebration awaits you...Go and prepare. Bella, won't you send in the maid?"** There was a loud scraping of chairs as those seated left the table and the room. Draco's mother did not look at him. **"Severus, stay."** He had not made to move. **"You have disobeyed me. You must be punished. You wouldn't want to go setting a bad example for our ****_novice recruits_****."**

**"Do as you must."** Draco knew what was coming the moment the Dark Lord reached inside of his robes but they were interrupted by a dirty, thin young woman. She entered the room quietly, tucking matted hair behind her ears, bowing her head to the Dark Lord.

**"Clean the table, set out the china and then return to the kitchen. Be quick."** The girl took a dirty rag from her apron and began scrubbing the dried blood from the table. Draco had not expected the Dark Lord to keep a muggle in his house but tried not to be distracted. He clamped his eyes shut as Snape suffered under Cruciatus over and over again. **"Hide the boy and give him a hiding. Do not show him a sliver of the mercy I have shown you..."**

The dining room door slammed shut. Snape's moaning ceased. Draco opened his eyes. Snape was curled on the rug and the maid was kneeling beneath the table with her hands clasped over her ears. Without Snape to hold him up, Draco had fallen to his knees beside him. Snape got to his feet without help as though he couldn't bear to be close to Draco. **"Sir, are you-"**

**"I'm fine...Don't...The effects will soon...wear off-"**Snape threw up all over the floor, came over faint, stumbled backwards into the cabinet and cut his hand open on the smashed glass. The muggle maid came gingerly across the room with the offer of water, pressing the rag she had been using to clean the table to Snape's bleeding hand. Snape glowered down at the vomit stained rug. He returned it to its previous dusty state with a quick spell, wiped clean and polished the table and set out the china in a fraction of the time it would have taken the girl. She took back the rag with a grateful and fearful smile. Draco had heard Rodolphous mention that Snape's mother had been a muggle but his kind treatment of the maid still seemed dangerous and out of place considering that he had murdered a man only an hour ago.

* * *

Snape did not allow himself to linger. He hoisted Draco to his feet and dragged him from the room. He hobbled, clutching his ribs as they made their way down the stairs and out of the house. Their passage across the grounds and through the gate was slow but eventually Snape apparated them away again. Free of the Riddle House, Draco felt a huge weight lifted from his shoulders. He could not stop the tears from rolling down his cheeks. He wanted to blame the apparition. Snape reached for his chin in a gesture of comfort but weakness overcame Draco and he recoiled. They were standing before a grey muggle residence on a damp cobbled street named 'Spinner's End'. Snape led them inside of the smallest house on the furthest corner of the street. After the airy expanses of the Riddle House, the cluttered, cosy furnishings of this strange place made Draco feel claustrophobic. Everything was neat and orderly but the whole place was coated in a thin layer of dust as though it had not been inhabited in some time. They passed the narrow staircase to the second floor, through an equally narrow hallway, turning right into a small, dark living room. Snape went about the room switching on muggle lights, igniting a room lined wall to wall with bookcases packed with bound volumes in all kinds of languages on potions and plants and the dark arts. Draco wondered if this was Snape's home but no family photos adorned the fireplace, only melted, dripping candles and empty potions flasks filled with dead flowers. Snape revived the flowers and opened a window to allow fresh air into the dusty room. He pushed Draco down into the comfortable, fraying sofa. **"Sit...I'll get you something."** Draco did as he was told, feeling too uneasy and out of place to do anything else as Snape limped into a dark adjoining room, shutting the door behind him. Draco did not hear him switch on the light for some time.

A kettle whistled loudly in the next room followed by the clinking of a spoon swirling in a cup. Snape appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking in at him, clutching two cups of hot cocoa. Draco was sitting in the corner of the old sofa with tears shining in his bloodshot, slate grey eyes. He pushed himself up off of the sofa and kneeled down upon the holy rug. **"What are you doing? Get up."**

**"I'll only fall to my knees when you curse me." **Draco had spent enough of the night being a coward. He would face his punishment with courage.

**"I have no intention of cursing you."** The way his own godfather refused to say his name convinced Draco that he deserved to be punished.

**"My mother did and you're stronger than her. Would you disobey more direct orders for me?" **Draco asked, getting up as Snape stumbled with the cups, dripping their contents onto the hardwood floors.

**"And more..."** Snape said as Draco took the boiling cups from his hands. Draco stepped away feeling uncomfortable and wiping Snape's blood from the rim of his cup. Snape closed his eyes and steadied himself on the arm of the sofa.

**"Sir...are you alright?"**

**"Don't touch me,"** Snape snapped as Draco tried to take his cup from him. Draco retreated, lowering himself into the armchair on the other side of the room. He took several large gulps of his hot chocolate, each one burning on the way down.

**"Curses would be better than your disappointment-"**Draco said as Snape sank down into the sofa where Draco had been sitting only moments ago.

**"I am not disappointed-"**An utterly exhausted Snape's eyes fluttered to a close.

**"Then fulfil your orders! I deserve it-"**Draco stared down at the dried blood on his muddy shoes wondering who it belonged to.

**"You are deluded as to what you deserve."** Incensed, Draco slammed his hands down on the arms of the chair but Snape did not stir.

**"Stop talking in riddles and curse me! I know you have it in you-"**Draco had resented being ignored ever since he was a child.

**"I have inflicted enough pain on others tonight,"** Snape sighed, flinching as he picked up his cup with his injured hand.

**"Father always said that pain was a part of life..."** Snape shook his head.

**"I vowed to your mother and your aunt that I would protect you. I am not the kind of man in the habit of making promises I cannot keep."** Bellatrix had alluded to Snape making an Unbreakable Vow but Draco had not truly believed her. He had been sure it was another of Snape's ploys to steal his glory and refused to trust his godfather's motives.

**"I didn't think I was either...It was foolproof...I just couldn't look him in the eyes and..."**

**"The ability to kill is not easily acquired. You are young and you will learn. Our Lord was satisfied. You surpassed expectations. You allowed his Deatheaters entrance to Hogwarts and led them to your target. You had one of the greatest wizards in the world at your feet-an enviable feat for a seventeen year old,"** Snape replied bluntly.

**"But father stays in prison and you took the fall...I didn't need saving-"**

**"I could not allow you to become a killer. You were always meant for better things,"** Snape replied sternly. Draco struggled to believe him. He would achieve nothing but more terrible things now. He could only think of Wormtail. He had betrayed his best friends with murder, turning to the Dark Lord for glory and recognition and got a lifetime of servitude in return. Draco knew that he stayed only because he no longer had anybody else. Draco was his modern equivalent. Those he had betrayed at Hogwarts would never forget. If they saw him in the street in the future they would want to kill him. His mother might not even forgive him for his failings. The loathing with which she had cursed him had felt genuine.

**"You must promise to go above and beyond to prove yourself to him and fulfil the next task he sets to the best of your ability."** If Bellatrix had been telling the truth and Snape had made an Unbreakable Vow to protect Draco, it was only in his best interests that the Dark Lord didn't murder him in a rage. Draco wouldn't fool himself into thinking somebody like Snape cared about him.

**"Haven't there been enough promises for one night?"** Draco sipped at his hot chocolate and eyed Snape's closed eyes, willing him to just say his name. He knew that being a Deatheater meant servitude or death and he couldn't just get taken off the mailing list.

**"Yes and all of them kept,"** Snape said, opening his eyes and draining his cup.

**"Can't I do something-anything...sir?"** Draco asked politely, in search of anything to take his mind off of thoughts of his last night at Hogwarts.

**"Rest and we will retrieve your things from the manor in the morning."** Draco handed him his own empty cup and he disappeared into the kitchen once more, limping and clutching his side. He returned quickly as though he had forgotten something, clutching a small glowing orb. It was a celestial globe. Snape handed it to Draco. **"I assume you thought I'd forgotten your birthday. I'm sorry that it isn't wrapped. I had one sent to your father in case it is a long time before he sees real stars."** Snape disappeared again. Draco was glad his father was in Azkaban, unable to learn of his failure and safe from Voldemort's wrath. It was where he belonged too. Draco laid his head on the arm of the chair. He shut his eyes but he was assaulted by flashing images of Dumbledore. He had never seen anybody die before. He would never have thought of Snape as a murderer and now he would never be able to think of him as anything else. The look of utter emptiness and the emotionless precision with which he had cast the killing curse over Dumbledore's weakened old body would stay with him forever. It was all he had to look towards. He had left school without finishing with only OWLs to his name. As a child he had always dreamt of working in the Department of Mysteries but now that was never going to happen. A normal job was no longer in his future. Dumbledore's murder had eliminated all other options for him. He was the accessory to a serious crime. He could serve his time in Azkaban or remain a slave to the Dark Lord's whim his entire life, just like his father. Draco could not bear the idea that history would repeat itself and that one day a woman might fall in love with him, they would have a child and he would be stolen from them by evil and fear. He did not want his children thinking that their father was a coward.

* * *

Snape returned from the kitchen wiping wet, soapy hands on a bloody towel. The cut on his hand was red raw. He seemed shocked to find Draco crying into his sleeves. **"What is it?"** All night Snape's tone had been one of veiled exhaustion but in that moment it shifted to a kind of parental concern. He kneeled beside Draco's chair, wincing at pain in his knees. The close proximity to Draco in his vulnerable state clearly made Snape feel strange and awkward and this only made Draco want to cry more. He was supposed to be a cold, strong Malfoy. For the past few months he had cried in an unused girl's bathroom to the ghost who lived there. He wondered if Snape had known about that. He wondered if Snape could even remember the last time he had cried. Draco knew now that was e to continue on down the path the Dark Lord had set out for him, his tears would have to be left in a box in that unused girl's bathroom with his sense of morality and dignity.

**"It's everything,"** Draco said, his eyes red and swollen, **"If you knew what I know..."**

**"Which is?"**

**"The reason why I can't promise to you that I'll go above and beyond..."** Draco stammered, sitting there in Snape's living room, utterly indebted to him and still questioning his loyalties. **"Mother looked so ashamed but...there's just no going back once you kill somebody. He'll have my soul forever! I'd rather die than live like that-always at his beck and call. I'd rather die by His hand, than be ruled by it, beaten by it..."** Draco had not meant to imply that he was better than Snape. His attentive expression did not change. **"I'm not my father...He made you my Godfather for a reason. Dumbledore said he could hide me and mother. Surely you could do that too...Won't you get me out? Give me the chance you never had. Please..."** Snape had gotten to his feet and was pacing before the fire, observing him thoughtfully. Draco had pleaded but he knew Snape had no choice. He had tangled them up in knots. If Snape did as any loyal Deatheater should have done and turned him over to the Dark Lord, he would have been killed for treason and the Unbreakable Vow would have taken Snape down with him.

**"It's not possible. Banish such thoughts of spinelessness from your mind and step up the plate. That tattoo on your left arm is permanent. You must learn to accommodate your decisions, particularly the poor ones-"**Dumbledore's phoenix flew in through the open window, startling Draco and causing Snape to stumble backwards and fall back down onto the sofa. Snape stared at it with large glossy eyes. It had perched itself beside him upon the arm of the sofa. Two fat glistening tears dripped from its black eyes, down onto Snape's bleeding hand. The blood cleared and the long angry looking cut disappeared. Snape ran his healed hand over the bird's head as Draco stared on in confusion. He knew about phoenixes and how they only left their owners to go to those who had shown loyalty to them. Snape had just murdered Dumbledore. His actions struck Draco as a bizarre show of devotion. Snape had lived a lie as a spy for the Dark Lord at Hogwarts for over a decade. He had also been a member of Dumbledore's secret society in charge of protecting Potter. He had made a vow which bound his life to Draco. His motives were no longer clear. Nothing was adding up. Still Draco hoped that this mystery of a man would dig deep and present him with an escape, saving both of their lives-saving him for those better things he so believed his godson was meant for.


	2. Chapter 2 Welcome Home Hostility

Chapter 2

Welcome Home Hostility

For once Harry Potter did not look back as he left Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He was glad to be getting away from a place which was beginning to hold more bad memories than good. Only a few days ago he had witnessed the school's greatest Headmaster and the last of his protectors, Albus Dumbledore plummet from the Astronomy Tower to the grounds below. A few days later he had broken off his relationship with Ginny Weasley, the only girl he would ever love, and vowed to himself that he and his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger would continue on with the task Dumbledore had set him, swapping the comfort of school for the dangers of the unknown. First he had to do as he had been ordered and return to the home of his remaining relatives. It was not the first time he was going back to them with a heart heavy with loss but it would be the last.

* * *

Before Dumbledore's funeral, letters had been sent and families alerted. McGonagall had arranged to have the Hogwarts Express take remaining students home early but if it had been an attempt at some semblance of normality it had failed. The throng of students walking from the castle to the front gates was smaller and quieter than ever. They were not planning action packed summers and exchanging addresses but trapped in separate bubbled of contemplation. Even the pets carried at their sides in cages seemed subdued as if out of respect for Dumbledore's passing. Ron informing his parents that he planned to return with Harry had been met with surprisingly little retaliation and his family accompanied them all to the carriages in order to say their goodbyes. Hermione was hugged first and then Harry, awkwardly and by everyone, including Ginny which felt most awkward of all.

Watching Ron's mother tearfully kiss and hug him goodbye with the urgency and tenderness of someone who was terrified she might never see her son again, Harry decided that he would return to Privet Drive alone. He pulled his best friend's aside with a sigh and a look over his shoulder at Mrs Weasley who had always treated him like a son and at Bill who was her son and half ruined fighting for Harry's cause. **"What's wrong?"** Ron was doing well to hide his upset but Harry could tell he couldn't stand to see his mother cry.

**"I can't let you do it. I swear to you that we won't miss Bill's wedding but I want you both to go home."** Ron let out an exasperated sigh but Hermione's expression softened as though she had been secretly hoping that Harry would change his mind.

**"Harry, we've already said that we're going with you-"**

**"I know and that means everything," **Harry said with a hand on Ron's shoulder, **"But...I wouldn't throw away any chance to see my parents and I don't want you to either. I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you and the last time your parents saw you..."** Ron took a single look over his shoulder at his father and siblings comforting his trembling mother and then nodded in agreement. Hermione approached Mrs Weasley to give her the good news. Harry grabbed Ron to stop him from following. **"You'll make sure that Ginny's okay? That she understands?"** Ron shifted uncomfortably before pulling Harry into a brief hug.

**"That's what brothers do. She's got enough of them to know that...Stay safe mate. I'll actually write this summer."** An appreciative Mrs Weasley pulled Harry into another hug whispering a stream of comfort and gratitude as the rest of the family looked on. Harry did his best not to make eye contact with Ginny and then clambered into the thestral drawn carriage after Hermione without another word.

Harry made the mistake of sitting up with his head out of the window as the carriage retreated around the castle walls. He caught sight of the tops of the quidditch goal posts and was bombarded with a sickening nostalgia and the realization that he no longer had any time for games. His eyes welled up and he blamed the wind when there wasn't any. Despite the good weather the carriages had been given their protective hoods and Harry took advantage of the privacy, lying down across the seat he would have shared with Ron. Hermione looked at him several times, opening her mouth as though she meant to say something only to close it again. Harry knew that she wanted to impart something rational and consoling about Ginny or Dumbledore and reached a hand across to grip hers. She smiled and buried her head in a book for the duration of the ride. Harry watched her read, unconvinced that she had taken in a single word, no doubt too preoccupied by thoughts of horcruxes, RAB, Snape and Dumbledore like they were an exam question that she was unsure she had answered correctly and was going over in hindsight. Harry sat up as the carriage drew in to the station, took away Hermione's book and gripped both of her hands. **"Hermione, promise me...no reading when you get home, no researching, no learning of any kind. Don't even bother with the Prophet, just live your life for a little bit. I don't want you to think about any of this, no horcruxes, no RAB, no Snape. I just want you to have fun and enjoy spending time with your parents...please."** Hermione smiled and reached across the carriage to draw Harry into a hug.

**"I promise."**

* * *

The decision not to return to Hogwarts had instantly transformed every aspect from things Harry had loved or hated into things he would miss. The first time he had left Hogwarts it was with the discovery of a new world and new friends and a lovingly compiled album of photographs of his parents. Now his heart felt like it had dropped into his stomach as he watched the first years disembark the boats which had once taken him across the Black Lake to the castle. Despite the stares and gossip from the first years, Harry waited for Hagrid because it didn't feel right to leave without a hug from him. Harry promised that he would stay safe and that they would see each other again even though he wasn't entirely sure either of those things was even possible and then he boarded the Hogwarts Express with Hermione for the last time. The train had never been so silent or full of tears and tension. Fearing attack, the main aisle was dotted with trained Aurors and Order member Nymphadora Tonks was sitting inside the driver's cabin. When the trolley came by with the offer of snacks Harry could not help himself and bought one of everything as he had naively done the very first time. Without a ravenous Ron to help him finish off his spoils Harry and Hermione were stuck with a reasonable amount of leftovers. Harry felt too fragile to stomach anything and a single chocolate frog reduced him to tears. Hermione took the Albus Dumbledore 'Famous Witch or Wizard Card' from him before his likeness had had time to disappear tucking it inside of one of her books. Harry rushed to the toilet where he was sick in the sink. He washed his scratched face, tried not to look at himself in the mirror and changed out of his dress robes. Harry blamed his sore eyes and swollen cheeks on travel sickness and laid with his head in Hermione's lap drifting in and out of uncomfortable sleep and nauseating flashbacks as she ran her hands through his hair.

Due to Harry's last minute insistence that his friends return home, Hermione's parents had not received a letter requesting that they meet her at King's Cross. Harry had no doubt that she could make her own way home but the thought of leaving her alone after he had spent the last few hours asleep on her lap filled him with dread. **"You will remember what I said-"**

**"Burn the books! Drugs, drink and partying until dawn! A promise is a promise,"** Hermione replied dryly and Harry laughed at the way uncle Vernon was staring at her as though she was the kind of bad influence he wouldn't allow within ten feet of Dudley. She hugged Harry again and promised to write the moment she got home. Harry was driven back to Privet Drive by a silent and yawning Uncle Vernon without so much as a 'hello' in greeting or a comment about his red eyes. He was not helped with his trunk, not that he had expected to be and found a much leaner Dudley asleep across the sofa and a 'welcome home' banner attached to the far wall. The dining room table bore the crumbs of a quickly devoured 'welcome home' meal. For a second Harry had liked the idea that it was for him, that someone had missed him as Sirius and Dumbledore no longer could. His aunt Petunia was clinking away in the kitchen, no doubt washing away the mess. Harry expected only more silence from her and rushed quickly upstairs to his cold and airy bedroom. He found it strangely clean; the sheets on his bed, his windows (which were without bars now), the carpet and his cupboard. The few clothes had had not taken to Hogwarts were hanging neatly in the cupboard and the old toy soldiers he had once played with in the cupboard under the stairs were lined up on his wiped down windowsill.

* * *

Harry would not bother unpacking his trunk. He could not even gather the courage to open it. He did not want to see the Gryffindor tie he would never wear again, the creased white shirts with collars smeared with Ginny's favourite lipstick or the torn blue t-shirt he had worn as he had forced Dumbledore to drink the potion which ultimately killed him. Harry laid back into his soft, fragrant bed sheets with a sigh. He could not feel the least bit bitter that his family had not made a special dinner to herald his return home. His early return probably inconvenienced them in some way. He had learned simply to never expect anything from them, and after Mad Eye's aggressive warnings at the station after Sirius had died and Dumbledore's harsh words with them last summer, Harry imagined that the atmosphere between them would only get worse in the time that they had left together. His aunt Petunia coughed as she slipped into the room. **"What is it?"** Harry asked, staring up at the ceiling. When he turned his head to look at her, she was still wearing soapy, pink rubber gloves and an apron, like she had made the spontaneous decision to come and speak to him, and holding a plate on which there was a large slice of Dudley's 'welcome home' lemon sponge cake. She placed the cake down on Harry's bedside cabinet with a small smile and surveyed the room. She looked as though she had seen it empty so often it was unsettling to have Harry back inside of it now.

**"Dudley couldn't keep his paws off of your cake..."**Her eyes stopped at the framed photograph of Harry's parents dancing in autumn leaves and her smile softened.

**"Thanks..." **Harry was taken aback by the gestures. Much had changed in the past year but he had not expected to return to some alternate reality where their relationship warranted civil conversations.** "You cleaned my room?" **

**"I like to keep a clean house Harry."** Harry felt his heart break when his aunt said his name so casually. He had few memories of her ever doing anything but shouting it before. In the last six years, Harry had only ever spent three months a year at most in the Dursley's company and he felt more like a strange lodger to his aunt than a beloved nephew.

**"What do you want?"** Harry was in no mood for small talk. He felt emotionally drained after the last few days at Hogwarts. His aunt removed her gloves, tucking them into the front pocket of her apron and looked over her shoulder as though anxious that her son or husband might overhear.

**"Alright..."** She stepped into the room, closing the door and leaning back upon it with a small sigh. **"Old Mrs Figg came across the way earlier-all in black she was. I thought perhaps one of her cats had croaked..."** Harry gave a weak smile. **"But she brought over a copy of that paper of yours-the...Prophet?"** Harry nodded in confusion. **"She wanted to tell me about...Dumbledore-the man who visited us last summer-your Headmaster."**

**"What's your point?"** Harry cut her off. Small talk stung like a cut soaked in murtlap. Talk of Dumbledore felt far too soon.

**"Well...I'm sorry,"** she said, shifting uncomfortably with an apologetic expression. Harry did not move off of the bed but turned his head away from her, his jaw clenched to stare angrily out of his bedroom window. Surely Dumbledore had not insisted that Harry return for this.

**"So...you thought that because someone close to me had died...again...that you being nice to me would cheer me up?"** For once Harry gave no care to whether he was being unkind. At that moment he could see no possibility in forgiving her misjudgement. **"My Godfather died last summer. I knew him a year! My parents-your sister died when I was one-another year! At no point over the last sixteen years did that make you think that you should be nice to me? Funny!"** Harry spat the last word when it was anything but and his aunt coughed like she was swallowing a sob. Harry had never seen her cry.

**"I-We-You have lived in this house free of charge-"**

**"Don't make me laugh! I was your slave..."** Harry propped himself up on his elbows to glare hatefully across at her. **"I asked nothing of you! Did you really hate mum that much? What is wrong with you?"** Petunia flinched, the photo pressed to her chest as though she never could have imagined Harry confronting her with such questions.

**"What is wrong with you? It's the grief speaking. You're upset..."** Harry grunted and flung himself into a sitting position so that his heaving back was to her and he no longer had to look at her. **"Why stay here if you hated it?"**

**"Because I ****_had_**** to. I'm protected here. You heard...Dumbledore."** Harry stumbled over his name but continued. **"Because somehow the same blood which ran through mum's veins goes through ****_yours_**** and mine and so...I am safe here."**

**"Safe from what?"** His aunt asked naively. Harry turned to her with dark eyes and a frown. She knew nothing of the evil which hounded him and Harry envied her. **"From ****_Him_****?"**

**"Yes! Him-your ****_sister's murderer_****; Voldemort."** His aunt shuddered at the name in the same way that magical folk did. Harry wondered if she had an image of him in her head.**"He's been trying to finish what he started every year since I turned eleven...trying to kill me too..."** Petunia gulped, Harry hoped guiltily. **"You could have been the kind of person I wrote home to but...you ****_chose_**** not to be didn't you?" **Harry was becoming sick of how much choice had determined in his life. **"Don't bother starting now. I don't need it. I don't want it. Things have changed."** Flustered and on the brink of tears his aunt Petunia left, slamming the door, covering her mouth with one hand and the photo of his parents clutched in the other. Harry had a hard time falling asleep that night.

* * *

The day following the funeral, the silent ride home and the argument with his aunt, the papers carried heavy news. The blaring headlines of muggle papers painted a picture of mysterious random brutality and tragedy as hundreds were killed, tortured and injured in an attack on a tube station. Witnesses recalled malfunctioning lights, flashes of colour in the darkness, a language they couldn't recognise, a giant snake and perpetrators in cloaks and masks. The dark wizard Lord Voldemort had gotten rid of Albus Dumbledore, the only wizard he had ever feared, and gone after the defenceless people he had always vowed to protect. It was an insult felt by the better half of the magical world and which, the Daily Prophet reported, locked the new Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in urgent talks with the Muggle Prime Minister about what could be done to protect his people. Harry was instantly reminded of the fact that Hermione had made her own way home and sent a short letter her way. Harry's aunt could barely look at the paper, whilst it was all his uncle could talk about. He thought that the authorities ought to be doing more to bring the murderers to justice. Petunia didn't seem to have the heart to tell him that this was an attack committed by the kind of people she had once been related to and that the man responsible had dedicated his life to hunting down the boy they put up in their spare bedroom. After her conversation with Harry it was clear to him that Petunia was afraid and Harry didn't want her to be. In the past no matter how much he had resented being babysat by the Dursley's whilst his friends enjoyed a world of magic, quidditch and secret societies, Harry had secretly took comfort in being able to breathe air that was not thick with the tension of a brewing war. Now it had seeped through the cracks and there was no escaping Voldemort and all that he aimed to destroy.

The Daily Prophet covered the attacks too. In between tributes to Dumbledore, the Ministry were committed to hunting down his killer. It should have been Harry's childhood rival and son of a fallen Deatheater, Draco Malfoy that they were tracking but in the end he had allowed another to step in; Severus Snape. Sixteen years ago, it had surprised everyone when Dumbledore had been the only one willing to vouch for Snape, a young penitent Deatheater and gone on to employ him for more than half of his life. Harry had watched the same supposedly reformed man kill Dumbledore with the swift precision of someone who truly meant it and chased him as he fled the castle. Snape's childhood home had burnt to the ground and Aurors had picked through the ruins. Whilst no trace of him was found, the burnt remains of Draco Malfoy were discovered. The front page held a blown up photograph of his mother Narcissa and she looked so broken that Harry could take no twisted delight from the fact that the spoilt brat she had helped to raise had finally gotten his comeuppance. Harry knew now that Malfoy had become a Deatheater to fill the place left by his incarcerated father and whilst at first it may have been something he wanted, later it became a strain he struggled to cope with alone. Despite reckless attempts to fulfil the seemingly impossible task of murdering the world's greatest wizard, Malfoy had still failed and paid for it with his life. Harry could not convince himself that he had deserved it. His family had been so poor that all they had was money. He had taunted and abused fellow students and a good percentage of his relatives were in prison or escaped and on the run. To show at his funeral would be to support all he had destroyed at Hogwarts and Harry knew that he would be buried before a procession of one. Still, none of that distracted from the fact that Draco Malfoy had been too young to die. Now there was no chance for his redemption.

Not that Harry believed that all people were gifted with such a positive capacity for change. Severus Snape was only going to get worse. He was a liar, a traitor and a murderer. In one night he had managed to destroy the reputation which it had taken Dumbledore decades to build, making him look like a fool. All year there had been talk that Dumbledore had lost his touch and that Hogwarts and its students would be put at risk and Snape had made it all true in a moment. Harry couldn't comprehend how Dumbledore, who had known so many things beyond normal intuition, had missed the obvious lack of morality in a man whose past was marred with violence and death. Harry had always seen the true character Snape had done so well to hide and vowed to avenge Dumbledore before the year was out. If honour and courage were the only things Gryffindors believed were truly worth living for, vengeance had to be the only thing worth killing for.


	3. Chapter 3 Horror At Godric's Hollow

Chapter 3

Horror At Godric's Hollow

James Potter had never been the kind of man who would turn his back on a fight. The moment someone had risen up with mind to threaten what he had struggled to build, he'd enrolled in the resistance without question. He had fought every battle; literal and internal and denied evil at every turn. When friends had gone missing and family members been slain, he had kept a brave face. Now that his best friends were risking their lives waging war on the darkest wizard of all time, James had been forced into hiding with his new wife Lily and their baby Harry and he felt defective and traitorous.

* * *

That dark wizard was now so feared that people no longer dared to speak his name. James and Lily had always dared and thrice defied Lord Voldemort already but others had not been so lucky. It was because of him that ordinary men and women walked side by side with danger and death. People went out to get milk and were never heard from again. The paper was overflowing with disappearances and gruesome murders so often that such headlines no longer came as a surprise. Since school, the toll of the departed had been mounting. The faces behind those crimes remained unpunished and Voldemort stalked the country growing in followers and influence with the seasons. The worst part was that Voldemort's faithful Deatheaters were not just faceless, brainless evil lemmings but people James and Lily had known at school. They were intent upon carrying out Voldemort's will of ridding the world of non-magical blood and somehow James's new family had gained the top spot on their hit list.

A prophecy had named Harry as the only one capable of bringing Voldemort's reign of terror to its knees. Harry was barely off his knees, still crawling around and falling down and little of a threat to anyone. Lily thought it was ridiculous-that prophecies like superstitions only came to life if one put energy and faith into them but Voldemort was exactly the kind of deluded individual who put stock in prophecies. They were moved by nightfall into a cottage within Godric's Hollow, the idyllic village where the leader of the resistance had spent most of his childhood. Come Halloween, six months later, not a single child had called at their front door exclaiming "trick-or-treat!" To all but one, James, his family and their home were utterly invisible. Voldemort voraciously scoured the country for a scent, torturing and beating their friends for information they would rather die than share and James lost the ability to look his only son in the eye. He was sure that his baby knew that he was a coward and he couldn't bear to meet his gaze. It was a gaze as emerald green as his mothers and always reflecting James's desires to change history. He knew as he knew that one day he would die, that he was the worst thing that had ever happened to his wife. She deserved better than a man who would agree to spend the first months of their firstborn's life on the run from the price on their heads. He should have gone running to meet the challenge and killed Voldemort where he stood. At the very least James knew he ought to have died fighting, but he was a father now and sacrifices had to be made for children. A coward for a father was better than no father at all. Still James longed that sooner rather than later they would be found.

* * *

Lily longed for contact with the outside world. She felt like the last person alive on a sinking ship. She was standing on the front step of the last cottage on the most southern street of Godric's Hollow. She was watching miniature witches, werewolves, mummies and vampires running wild on the streets, swinging buckets heavy with confectionery and knocking jovially, door to door. Some parents escorted their children, walking hand in hand, whilst others waited for them at home, utterly at ease that even on a night like Halloween they would return unharmed because nobody was lurking in the darkness with evil intentions. It was hard for them to imagine anything terrible happening in such an idyllic place. Lily would have given anything to be one of those parents but she was too terrified by the idea of what _was_ out there to enjoy Halloween. Somebody was lurking in the darkness with evil intentions and even hidden beneath an enchanted sky she was terrified. She was soothed by memories of simpler times. She wanted to play hopscotch on the shining pavements like she was a little girl. Back then she had lived for Halloween. It had been the one night a year that she could fully immerse herself within the fantasies of her favourite books. Now that she knew that the frightening creatures which haunted their pages were as real as the dark wizard who meant to see the light leave her eyes, she couldn't stand the idea of celebrating Halloween. There was no orange and black bunting hanging in their living room, no enchanted cobwebs shrouding their windows, no fake fireflies lighting their garden and no carved pumpkin sitting before their front door. Her Wendy Darling costume had not been worn in years and she had come to realise that there was no such thing as escape to Neverland. She had grown up and she was waiting for fate to find her hiding place.

Nobody else could hear Harry's crying but it cut away at Lily's very core. She felt as though they were dissolving bit by bit and would soon become as invisible as the house. Harry wailed like he wanted the whole world to hear. His cries seemed to echo not only down one street but a thousand streets. Surely he did not want to be invisible either. Every milestone he had reached so far had fallen upon deaf ears. Only his parents had heard his first word, 'mama', and seen him take his first steps. He was a miracle, made by two inimitable people on their most sincere day of living and he deserved to be shared. Harry had not slept a single night at Godric's Hollow the whole night through. He was as tired as his parents looked. James scooped Harry up in his arms and his crying ceased instantly. He threw his son playfully up into the air, catching him as he came down. Lily watched as Harry flew through the air, his messy hair on end, smiling ear to ear. **"James, do be careful. He's just been-"**

**"Don't worry. He loves it! Look at his face! Look at his-"**James squeezed a red faced laughing Harry close and he promptly threw up down his chest. James grimaced in disgust and Lily stifled a laugh.

**"Your boy is a born prankster."** James stared down at his soiled shirt, holding a dripping Harry at arm's length.

**"Credit where it's due. He got me good. Didn't see it coming at all. You two planned this together. You really should have warned me Lily."**

The front door shut behind them, locking out the cooling Halloween night. James placed Harry down in his playpen in the living room, turned on the radio and peeled off his soaked shirt. James leaned into the pen smiling at Harry as he chattered nonsensically. **"Say papa. Pa-pa. Come on. Papa."**

**"Padfoot?"** Harry asked holding a small stuffed black dog up to his father. James shook his head.

**"Still no luck with that?" **Lily asked laughing.

**"Do you know how it feels to be outranked by you, Padfoot, bath and cup?"** Suddenly a song from their youth filled the room. It was a 60's classic Lily and James had once danced to within the comforting castle walls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry under the best Headmaster the place had ever known; Albus Dumbledore. He was also the leader of the resistance of which they were a part, The Order of the Phoenix and the main reason that they were still alive and safe from harm. Hearing the song again, James took it as a sign that one day soon things would be just as carefree as they had once been and pulled his unwilling wife into his arms. He danced her in circles, kissing her neck and her lips. Harry stood up in his pen staring expectantly up at his parents, lost within each other's gaze and memories of a time before his existence had uprooted their lives. The danger which enveloped them stopped the fire beneath their love from ever going out and it was one of the few things James was truly thankful for. Harry threw grasping hands up into the air and fell back onto his backside. Lily pulled away from James laughing lightly. The song ended and their silent, invisible reality dawned upon them both. **"Our boy needs a haircut."** Harry sat back up with black hair in his eyes, and scrawled irritably on pieces of paper with crayons.

**"He would make a pretty little girl,"** James replied in jest, falling exhausted onto the sofa.

**"Just as well...if He's out there looking for a boy!"** Lily's green eyes welled up and James pulled her by the hand down onto his lap, holding her close. He had lost count of the number of nights he had found Lily standing over Harry's cot, looking in at him, trying to un-riddle the meaning behind the cards life had dealt them. **"Look at him. How could anybody believe that-"**

**"Flower..."** James wiped his wife's tears away with his hands but she was hysterical.

**"He's just a baby! Why would anybody want to hurt him?"** James sighed. They had had this conversation too many times before. He held her and hushed her and waited for her to calm down.

**"You know Lily, sometimes I'm glad that we're stuck in this place."** Lily stared at him sore eyed and nonplussed. **"I just couldn't take Harry anywhere."** James leaned into the playpen to pick Harry up and dangled him in front of his mother's tear streaked face, tickling him so that he laughed. **"He's so ****_damn_**** handsome. He'd make the other babies look bad!" **Lily stared at their son with his sparkling green eyes and overgrown, messy black hair in a stained onesie with vomit dripping down his chin and she couldn't help but smile. Lily sniffed at Harry and recoiled.

**"Bath time I think."** James gave Lily another kiss and disappeared upstairs with Harry over his shoulder.

**"Bath!"** Harry shouted joyfully. Splashing in the tub was one of his favourite things to do. It even made Lily feel safe and normal and almost free of Godric's Hollow, Voldemort, his prophecy and its restraints.

* * *

Lily took up James's vomit covered shirt and threw it into the laundry basket thinking about how their semblance of safety rested solely in the hands of another. Once Dumbledore had been entirely sure that Voldemort had singled Harry out as Voldemort's lone target, he had insisted that they entrust their whereabouts to one person alone, hiding them in their soul and dropping off of the map. Dumbledore had volunteered himself but James had wanted a friend. There wasn't a single soul he trusted more than his school friend and fellow member of the resistance, Sirius Black. Sirius however was adamant that he was far too obvious a choice and not nearly trustworthy enough. Instead they had gone with their other school friend Peter. He had always been the soft spoken, harmless member of their group and nobody could imagine him holding or spilling such a secret. Now he was the only one who could tell anybody where they were and living in a rented apartment close to Sirius and his partner Remus's cabin in the southern forest. They followed orders and carried on with a show of normality, sure that to retreat from the world would make it obvious that they had something to hide. Peter continued to work at the paper, The Daily Prophet. Remus had stopped writing fiction and started writing facts, guidebooks for how best to combat the evil that was sweeping the country. Against all advice Sirius had dropped out of Auror Training the moment James had and was working part time in a muggle bakery as close to Godric's Hollow as Dumbledore had allowed.

The war had denied them all the life they had envisioned at school. Lily had married the man she loved and had a healthy, beautiful baby with him but somehow the reality of her life did not come to close to measuring up to her childhood daydreams. At the hospital, on July 31st James had barely cut Harry's cord before they were being packed up and forced into hiding. Harry had had his first birthday a few months ago. It had not been the big family party he deserved but a 'Happy Birthday' chorus of two, a small cake and no gifts. Lily had gone to bed in tears. Harry had enjoyed only one day trip into the wizarding world and the arms of his extended family so far. The autumn of his birth he had been christened at a small London church and Sirius named his Godfather. She and James had danced in the street as Remus had snapped their photograph with one hand and held Harry in the other. Sirius had stood by playing guitar and smoking a cigarette whilst Peter warily eyed the empty, frosty street. She missed the sound of their voices, arguing, laughing and poking fun at one another. Nothing seemed fun anymore, Lily thought as she stared at the closed living room curtains bitterly. She kept the curtains drawn for most of the day, unable to stand the sight of the sunlit tombstones lining the church graveyard which stood opposite their cottage. Each one was like a single tooth inside of a smiling mouth, an omen of the death and danger which seemed to follow them always.

* * *

Lily was the centre of a roaring mess and the house wasn't going to clean itself. She had graduated from Hogwarts with top grades and could have wiped the house fresh with a single spell but as they were living amongst muggles, use of magic was prohibited. Dumbledore was convinced that it would make it harder for Voldemort to find them but Lily couldn't care less. They were practically living as muggles and she couldn't stand it. She felt as though she had regressed to her childhood life. James had used to use his Invisibility Cloak to go down to the train station and watch enviously as people came and went, greeting one another and waving goodbyes. Lily was secretly glad when Dumbledore had dropped by and demanded that James hand over the cloak. She knew that James longed to return to his magical roots too but he had more reasons than she did to remain in hiding. He had lost family to Voldemort before and refused to do so again. 'Family is not who you are born but who you become devoted to. Three legs can keep a family standing. Stay strong beautiful,' Remus had instructed in his last letter but Lily was finding it harder than ever. The last time Remus had laid eyes on Harry, he had barely measured the length of his arm. He had stared at Remus's amber eyes like they were fireflies. They were pack animals and whilst it was true that absence made the heart grow fonder, it grew blue and lonesome too.

Lily took some comfort in sending one way letters like mini confessionals to Severus Snape. He was an old childhood friend who had long ago lost his way and would not have replied even if he had been given a return address. They had not spoken properly for almost 3 years when she had fallen for his enemy, James in their final school year. He had visited her very briefly at the hospital the night Harry had been born and that was the last time before this whole mess that they had spoken in person. He was now one of the followers of the man who wanted her dead. Despite this, Lily wrote to him often, pouring her heart, hopes and worries into those letters, as though she wished that she alone had the power to pull him back from the edge. There had been a time when she had told him stories and he had been the one to introduce her to magic. It was the kind of bond which was not easily broken and Lily often felt tugs on the string.

* * *

James came down the stairs wearing pyjamas and a bathrobe, cradling a clean, worn out Harry in his arms. **"I thought you'd like to put him down. He always likes your stories the best."** Harry was wrapped in the plaid blanket that he dragged everywhere with him. James placed their son in the laundry basket on the sofa and kissed his forehead. For a fleeting moment Lily spotted the sadness which James tried so hard to hide.

**"Halloween's hitting you hard isn't it? I know you're missing them."**

**"We used to have such great times pranking everybody,"** James sighed, taking the photo of his best friends up off of the mantelpiece. **"Do you remember that great party in sixth year? You were the sexiest phoenix I have ever seen."**

**"If I'd known you were the man beneath the mummy's bandages I'd never have kissed you."**

**"Behold the beauty of the costume. It was all Remus's idea..."** James trailed off sadly and replaced the photograph. Lily stared down at Harry's sleeping form in the laundry basket. James had cut his hair.

**"I'll never understand how you get him to drop off so easily."**

**"No one can resist the Potter charm,"** James replied smugly wrapping his arms around Lily with a boyish grin.

**"I seem to recall myself doing so for a number of years."** James ran a hand over his wife's hair and pulled her in closer to his chest. Lily lifted her head to smile at him.

**"Everybody knew you were in denial,"** he said confidently, **"You soon came around and after all of these years, you're still head over heels."** Lily laid her head on his chest and sighed.

**"Your heart beats so loud."** Perhaps it was its rhythmic drumming which sent Harry to sleep so easily.

**"Always will be flower."** For all of the nights shouting themselves hoarse and the silent tension filled mornings, Lily knew that she had been made to love James Potter.

**"I love you."**

* * *

The urgency in Lily's voice when she had said the words he had always longed to hear as a schoolboy unsettled him. It was as though she was worried that if she didn't say it right at that second she might never get the chance to say it again and it broke his heart. It was his job to protect her from worry and he couldn't even do that. He had been more than ready to give Lily his well practiced speech before she had disappeared up the stairs to the nursery. He lashed out at the mantelpiece swiping the photograph and several unlit candles onto the floor. Too often Harry cried the whole night through and Lily would stand over his cot crying too. James would like awake, alone and helpless remembering just how Lily had smiled and cried at the same time during the first dance at their wedding. Harry had not counted into their plans then. They had been oblivious to what their married future would hold. Now he felt like a criminal, running from place to place, living in fear and forever glancing over his shoulder. It wasn't the Gryffindor way and there were so many other ways he could have been contributing to the cause in such dark times. Not that he would exchange Harry for any other kind of life. Life without him was worth nothing. He was the best of both worlds with Lily's eyes and his unruly hair. James wished for him to be as well-read as Remus, as fun loving as Sirius and as steadfast as Peter. James had once lived for those boys and now he felt as though he was missing a limb. He did his best to keep Lily's already waning spirits up but the house always felt cold and they constantly had to sweep the snow their unhappiness made out of the back door. James tried to convince himself that unhappy was better than dead but sometimes it was harder than trying to understand Harry's infantile nonsense. He couldn't admit any of this to Lily and his pride prevented him from putting it all in a letter to Remus or Sirius. Instead he crossed the street into the graveyard and whispered it to the oldest tombstones he could find.

He collapsed into the comfortable cushions of the sofa. Something within the pocket of his bath robe began to vibrate. James took out a handheld mirror. It belonged to a pair he had created at Hogwarts to communicate with Sirius whenever they had been in separate classes, detentions or on holidays. Dumbledore did not know about it and he could not hand it over. He knew that he wasn't supposed to have any contact with the outside world other than hand written proof-read letters but he could not live without his best friend. He wiped his face and held the mirror to eye level. Sirius's smiling face appeared in the glass instead of his own reflection. **"Happy Halloween Padfoot..."**

**"You too man,"** came the voice James had needed to hear for the better part of two weeks. Sirius's face was not as handsome as usual but cut and bruised.

** "What happened to your face?"**

**"It's nothing. The Deatheaters got a hold of me. We did well to call their bluff Prongs. I kept mute and I'm due to check on Peter in a bit so don't you worry-"**

**"What did they do to you?"** James had read a dozen stories of their brutality and he doubted that Sirius the pure-blood blood-traitor member of the resistance would be let off with a slap on the wrist. **"How long did they have you?"** Sirius was silent for a moment and then he said:

**"Two weeks."** James almost choked; his heart instantly in his throat.

**"You're okay aren't you?"** Sirius was anything but fragile. He had taken beatings before. James just hated to imagine Remus waiting home alone to read in the Prophet that Sirius's mangled body had been discovered in a water logged field whilst they lived in comfort, hidden from immediate danger.

**"Don't be like that. You know me. Skin heals. I'll be fine."** James was not comforted. Skin was never what Voldemort's Deatheaters sought to break. Sirius could have been in pieces and he was not there to put him back together. **"Are you okay Prongs? You sound tired-"**James had tried not to allow the exhaustion to shine through in his voice but Sirius knew him better than he knew himself.

**"I've been up with Harry since 6. You'll be glad to know that every time I ask him to say 'papa' he says 'padfoot' instead."** Sirius let out a bark like laugh.

**"Nice to know he's got his priorities straight-"**

**"Is Remus alright? He doesn't hate me because the Deatheaters took you-"**

**"James. Listen to yourself man. You're being ridiculous. Remus loves you, no matter what and he misses the shit out of you...You ought to get some sleep. You are eating aren't you? Just know that we're doing all we can. Don't worry too much. You wouldn't want that glorious head of hair of yours to start falling out in clumps. You're going to end up a paranoid old crackpot like Snivellus."** James laughed and rubbed his sore eyes. **"Dark thoughts will choke you in that place so just know that it's not for long. Hold tight Prongs, keep your Lily watered and our Harry happy."**

* * *

Sirius's smiling face disappeared as the house was plunged into total darkness. The two-way mirror fell from James's hands and rolled under a cabinet. Sirius's voice crackled into static. James jumped to his feet, grabbed their wands from the coffee table and drew the curtains.** "Lumos." **A hooded figure was standing in the street separating their cottage from the graveyard. There would be no more hiding. Voldemort had broken through Dumbledore's defences and come for them at last. Mornings spent duelling imaginary assailants at the back of the church flooded James's mind; he was ready. James crashed into Lily on the stairs and pressed her wand into her hands.

**"It's just a blackout James-"**

**"Lily, take Harry and go! It's Him! Run! I'll hold him off!"** Lily needed no time to gather her thoughts and allow what James was telling her to sink in. This was the very reason that they had been living like criminals for a year and a half. The gravity of the situation had her clinging around his neck, kissing him as fiercely as though it was the very first time.

**"No...No James, please. I vowed never to leave you,"** she whimpered as James kissed her back and pushed her unwillingly up the stairs.

**"Lily I love you. Always have...Always will,"** he said knowing that if he didn't say it now, there might not be another chance. She turned to stare at him, knowing that she might not see him alive again. The front door flew open of its own accord. James stood firm. There would be no more running or hiding. It was now or never.

**"I thought your parents had taught you better manners Potter. Aren't you going to invite me in?"**

* * *

His voice was just as laced with the poison as the papers had all reported. Lily could not imagine Severus or anyone else spending evenings listening to him spout orders and delusions. She knew that if you were unlucky enough to hear his voice you were already damaged or about to die. James would never agree to join him and he was not strong enough to fight him off alone. He was a competent wizard but he had given up Auror Training to go into hiding and had been worrying himself sick for months. His heart was in the right place but Lily knew that he didn't stand a chance. Voldemort had come not in search of a battle but a slaughter. Lily found herself for the first time in her life, assaulted by memories of cold morning visits to airy muggle churches on school fieldtrips and began praying to whoever was listening to spare James. They were all too young to die.

**"You took my parents and my sister but you won't take what I've made. Not Lily! Not Harry!" **she heard James bellow and the tears began to roll down her cheeks in waves. James had already escaped Voldemort once and he was not in the habit of giving second chances. There were the sounds of violent commotion below, neither of them speaking, just tarrying spells back and forth, shattering vases, knocking down walls, cracking wooden doors and destroying framed photographs. Lily stood above, her back pressed to the furthest wall, her whole body trembling. The crashing had awoken Harry and he was sobbing. Lily closed her eyes against the sound and tried to concentrate on her memories of James but she couldn't. Her mind refused to make a memory out of a living man. Her thoughts turned instead to the last letter inside she had sent to Severus. Against her better judgement, it was his long, pale face she wished to see, striding through their front door, wand raised ready to fight Voldemort off and re-light the fire which had once burned so fiercely beneath their friendship.

* * *

As though he knew exactly what his mother was thinking and that his father was falling to his knees downstairs, Harry opened his mouth and said the single word James had been trying to pry from his lips all summer. **"Papa..."** There was silence below. As much as Lily wanted to be proud of Harry, a part of her knew that if he was saying it now it was only because he no longer had a father to say it to. He kept on repeating it, louder with every single one and Lily willed him to stop. She was out of her mind, racing to the door at the thud of feet on the stairs.

**"James!"** Her husband had come back for them, arms and smile wide, eyes brimming with happy tears to tell her that it was finished. **"No..."** Lily fell to her knees, Harry the very vision of his father clutched close to her chest. James was standing in the door but only barely and he was not alone. The predator who had been hunting them across the country for almost two years was standing behind him. Lord Voldemort did not look like much of a man anymore. His slanted red eyes betrayed him. He dropped James's wilted figure to the floor. Lily reached a single hand towards him.

**"Avada Kedavra!"** Lily drew her hand back, shielding her eyes against the harsh green light. That had not been James's voice. A high pitched cackle filled the room. That had not been James's sweet laugh. His heart was not beating loudly anymore and everything felt lost.

**"Give me the child and I will spare your life."** Lily would not allow him to spare her. James was in her head and Harry was her heart-both were necessary to survive.

**"How did you find us? Dumbledore said we were safe-"**She tried to stall him unable to find the words to detail her revulsion. Harry was staring at James's cooling body on the floor, his arms reaching out and his tiny hands grasping at thin air.

**"I can imagine,"** Voldemort spat in mocking, **"I have my means-"**

**"Who did you torture the truth out of? Remus would rather die. Surely it wasn't Sirius-"**

**"You underestimate Black's loyalty. It was your beloved but foolish puppet Pettigrew." **Lily's heart froze. She could not untangle the reasons behind his treachery. "**He betrayed you. He was easily bought. The mindless ones always are. He wanted a little glory and I gave it to him where Potter would have stolen it."** Dumbledore had warned that it was always the ones who aroused the least suspicion and as always he had been right. If only they had chosen him as Secret Keeper, this could all have been avoided.

**"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!"** Lily resorted to the only means she had left. She laid her wand down at her feet and turned her back to Voldemort in an attempt to shield Harry from whatever attack was about to be rained down upon them.

**"Stand aside you silly girl...Stand aside ****_now_****..."** Voldemort was actually willing to spare her. He was not the same bloodthirsty murderer she had read so many stories about. He still wished to kill her defenceless child and if he was willing to spare her now she knew that she would pay for it in time. She refused to succumb to a lonely life, haunted by Harry and James and indebted to Voldemort. Without them she had nothing.

**"Not Harry, please no. Take me. Kill me instead-"**She was begging and she was unashamed. James would have continued to fight but Harry was their little boy and she would do what was in her power to protect him. She could not defeat Voldemort alone. She was crying and Harry was screaming, both of their voices lost to the roar of a sudden gale.

**"I don't want to have to kill you, mudblood! Just the child...Stand aside and it will all be over!"**

**"Not Harry! Please...have mercy...have mercy..."**

**"Mercy? Poor, poor, silly girl..."** Lily leaned over the cot, placing crying Harry back inside of it, wrapped in his beloved blanket, beneath his mobile of sparkling stars and planets. She lowered her lips to his forehead, a great shadow looming over her in the light of her discarded wand.

**"My baby boy, my baby, your mama and papa love you. Stay strong darling. We will always love you-"**

**"AVADA KEDAVRA!"**

* * *

The light of her wand dimmed and went out altogether. Lord Voldemort let out a sigh of his own as the girl crumpled to the carpet. Her death had been unnecessary but every wall standing between him and immortality had to be broken down. The infant had exhausted himself and was no longer crying. By all rights he should have been and the intensity of his stare made Voldemort shudder. He had never liked children. **"You dare to look at me? Yes, you are the one...and you will be with your mudblood mother soon, Harry."** Those emerald eyes identical to his mothers seemed to flash with rage in the darkness and Voldemort felt bile rise in the back of his throat. He could not bear to look at the thing anymore. He held his wand to the infant's head, his hand held steady as he shouted the killing curse for the third time that day; **"AVADA KEDAVRA!"** There was the same blinding green light and a cry but it was not Harry's last. The killing curse had back-fired. Voldemort was engulfed by agony, his body disintegrated and his soul dispersing into the air. The cottage's foundations began to collapse, the living room walls falling in upon themselves as the Dark Lord Voldemort fled, defeated by the love of a mother for her son. The cottage was left in partial ruins, half of the nursery crumbling down in to what was left of the kitchen, the garden filled with rooftop tiles and a smoking emblem cast high in the navy sky above it. The Dark Mark, Voldemort's mark but there had been no victory at Godric's Hollow.

* * *

As smoke was settling and dust dying an hour later, a man came rushing down the street, black robes billowing out behind him. **"No..."** A saddened whisper left his lips as he realized that no one could have survived such destruction. He frantically clambered through the ruins littering the front garden. He tore down the front steps, into what was left of the living room, extinguished the fire, stepped over scattered letters and books and pulled himself up the shattered stairs. The body of his schoolyard enemy James Potter was lying broken in the stairwell. He had imagined him dying many times during their youth but never like this. His handsome face was not frozen in determination. He had not died in battle but been slowly beaten down. Severus leaned down and shut his eyes, continuing up to the top of the stairs to look right into the empty bedroom and then left into the nursery, half of which had gone crumbling into the garden. The way the carpet was scorched black told him that it had happened there. He returned to the ground floor to where the broken empty white cot was sitting, half on fire and half buried in rubble, filled with broken wooden stars. The child had to be dead. Severus was standing, ready to leave, having seen enough and with little hope that he would ever see her again when a tendril of red hair blowing lightly in the breeze just a few feet away caught his eye. He dug away what he could of the cutlery, smashed plates, burnt stuffed bears, bricks and plaster until her face was visible. **"Lily..."** He knew better than most what the faces of the dead looked like and hers was unmistakable. He needed this last moment with her. He wanted her to know that he would never forgive himself. She had sent him a series of pleading letters, begging him to turn back to the boy who had grown up a few streets from her and away from the Dark Lord, to leave his side and be at hers fighting for what he knew was right. He had ignored her and insulted her, done his best to pretend that he didn't care about her or about the lives Voldemort was destroying. He had no family and he had seen no reason why anybody else should enjoy the fruits he was so denied. It was slowly becoming the biggest mistake of his life.

* * *

Large booted feet broke glass underfoot. **"Show yourself!" **The half giant Hagrid, sent by Dumbledore, called out into the fading darkness. Severus Snape disapparated into the night. Hagrid stemmed tears of his own as he searched the steaming rubble for James Potter. When he found him on the stairs he carried him outside and laid him down beside his wife. Hagrid lost his footing and bent down at the sounds of cracking glass. James's glasses, the lenses shattered were protruding from beneath his large boots. There was the roar of a motorcycle. Hagrid had barely had time to turn around before Sirius Black had fallen to his knees at Hagrid's feet rubbing dirt from the face of his best friend with his hands. He was sobbing uncontrollably, all snot and shuddering breaths, and it scared Hagrid to death. Sirius had never been what anybody could call calm or composed but few people had ever seen him cry. He had been tortured mercilessly by Deatheaters for days and never spilt a tear. The fact that he was doing so now and without control seemed to mark the beginning of the end. **"Oh James...Are those his glasses?"** Sirius stared up at him wiping red eyes with dirty palms. Hagrid nodded and dropped the twisted metal into his awaiting hands. **"He can't see without his glasses you know..."** Sirius was white and trembling when Hagrid finally managed to pull him to his feet. Sirius had pulled Harry's favourite tartan blanket from the rubble and was standing repairing the burn holes and tears, still crying hysterically.

**"Am' sorry-"**Was all Hagrid managed to get out, before he was cut off by a child's weeping echoing through the dusk. Both men brightened at the prospect of a survivor from such destruction.

**"Harry!"** Sirius called out as he went scrambling over broken window frames and shards of wardrobe in search of his Godson. Hagrid found him first, blood streaming from a deep cut on his forehead. Sirius rushed to them, wrapping Harry in the blanket and using his sleeves to wipe away the blood streaming into his glassy green eyes.

**"Not deep. He looks alrigh'-"**

**"Let me hold him Hagrid, please."** Hagrid was cautious but felt too badly about everything to refuse. Tears were still making tracks down Sirius's grimy cheeks as he looked down at Harry squirming in his arms. **"I'm his Godfather. I'll love him. I'll be like a father to him-"**

**"Sorry lad. No way, no how." **Hagrid forcefully removed Harry from Sirius's arms and he fell backwards into the dirt. **"Strict orders from Dumbledore. 'E wants 'im outta our world for now. Gotta' take 'im to 'is aunt an' uncle's-"**

**"Muggles? No! Me! It's what James would have wanted-"**

**"Well James ain't ere is 'e!"** Sirius seemed instantly snapped out of his hysteria. No longer shaking, he jumped to his feet and wiped away the last of his tears with rough hands looking down at his fallen friends.

**"No, he isn't..."** Sirius trailed off, his mind racing, chest heaving and hands curling into fists, blue eyes cast outraged at the lightening sky, **"You take my bike Hagrid..."**

**"Tha's mighty good a yer, Sirius. I'll bring it back-"**

**"Don't worry about it. I won't be needing it where I'm going."** Sirius Black made his way out of Godric's Hollow with blood on his hands and revenge on his mind. James and Lily had gone down with their ship. He planned on doing the same and he was taking mutinous Peter Pettigrew down with him.


	4. Chapter 4 Cardboard Box Keepsakes

Chapter 4

Cardboard Box Keepsakes

Harry woke with a start, feverish and nauseous, as though he had been the one fighting Voldemort in a crumbling cottage. He tore back the covers, threw himself down the length of the hallway and into the bathroom, where he threw up into the sink. When Harry felt faint and empty, he opened the window and stared out into the dark night sky, taking great gulps of fresh air. The stars twinkling above him seemed out of place after all he had just seen. After Dumbledore's death he had been expecting nightmares but nothing could have prepared him for that. He couldn't erase the image of his barefoot father lying lifeless, inches from his own infantile grasping fingers, out of his mind and his body meant to expel everything else in the hopes that it would follow. He couldn't help but feel that he hadn't taken full advantage of the eleven years he had been led to believe that his parents had died in a car crash; quickly and accidentally and whilst he now knew that his mother had died for love and his father had died fighting, neither seemed heroic under a telescope. Their lives, loves and personalities had been torn asunder and Harry felt like the worst thing to ever have happened to his parents. He couldn't stand the idea that his own father had felt like a coward but he knew just how it felt to want to be found. He too was hidden in plain sight but Voldemort could not come knocking. If he killed Harry's remaining relatives it would only prove his aunt right in her belief that magic was no good. Ron and Hermione had not written and Harry decided that he was leaving Privet Drive without them. He refused to come between anyone else and happiness for a second longer. They had a better chance of growing old with Harry out of the picture.

* * *

Harry charged down the corridor and back into his room where he grabbed an old backpack and pulled open his trunk. It was empty and Harry knew that his aunt and her cleaning OCD were to blame. With backpack in hand, he carried on down the stairs. He turned right into the kitchen, bent down before the washing machine and pulled out his unwashed clothes. He barely noticed his aunt Petunia where she was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. The newspapers detailing the attacks were spread on the table along with several holiday brochures. Her face was lit by the glow of Dudley's laptop. She wiped her face at the sight of Harry and rushed to pour her wine down the sink. **"What on earth are you doing? You ****_do_**** realise that Vernon has work in the-"** Harry turned to glare at her, trying to convince himself that if he left now she might survive to criticise someone else for years to come.** "Is that vomit? Are you ill?"** Harry ignored her and continued packing. It was too late for her to start showing him any kind of concern. They had not spoken in days. She followed him back up the stairs and stood watching with arms crossed as he pulled on a pair of trainers and a jacket.** "Where are you planning on going at this time of night?"** There was nowhere Harry could go that wouldn't put somebody at risk. He would have to do as Sirius had once done and roam the countryside like an escaped convict, living in disguise, sleeping in caves and stealing to get by. He'd use his Invisibility Cloak to stay out of sight, pick up a tent and some blankets, place an extension charm on his backpack, camp out alone and somehow find and destroy as many horcruxes as possible before Voldemort found and destroyed him. **"Harry-"**

** "I wasn't aware that I had to report to you," **Harry snapped, staring at Hedwig, knowing that it would be best to set her free. He didn't have the heart to do so. **"Take Hedwig to an animal shelter. She can't follow me where I'm going."**

Harry's hands were shaking too much to close the clasp on his backpack. Growing frustrated, he threw the whole thing across the room and clothes spilled out across the carpet. He shot to his feet too quickly and came over faint again, stumbling backwards into his aunt. She steadied him at the elbows and tried to manoeuvre him to the bed but Harry refused to be helped and rushed to pick up the backpack. He slung it half empty and hanging open over his shoulder and slipped his invisibility cloak through the strap. Petunia stood watching him, holding the blood stained shirt Harry had worn when he had made the mistake of attacking Draco Malfoy in the girl's bathroom.**"You can't leave like this,"** his aunt insisted, moving unwillingly out of the doorway as Harry left the room. Harry knew that she meant in sick stained pyjamas and trainers but he knew that in the middle of the night was the best of all times to leave and that he should have done so the moment he got off the train. **"At least wait until I've had a chance to wash your clothes-"**

**"You don't get it do you?"** Harry turned in the narrow hallway to grab his aunt by the arms. **"Voldemort is coming for ****_me_**** and he's not going to find me hiding."**

**"Are you afraid?"** she asked. Harry considered lying to her. He was terrified but he could no longer linger under the fantasy that the shelter of family and friends made you exempt from hurt.

**"Not anymore...The sooner I get out of here, the better for everyone."** Harry left his aunt standing alone in the hallway and pulled open the front door.

**"Do you think Lily would have gone into hiding if it weren't for you and James? You've got to have something worth fighting for. You won't make it on your own. Nobody ever has."** Harry had given up everything worth fighting for in the hopes that it might keep them safe but perhaps safe just wasn't what people were supposed to be. People were supposed to be together and in love and enjoying life even in the face of danger. It wasn't the length of a life that mattered but what was done with the time given. All of this occurred to Harry where he was stood with his hand on the doorknob transfixed by the tabby cat sitting firmly on the low garden wall of number four Privet Drive. It had round markings like spectacles around its eyes and it almost looked shocked at the sight of him. Harry smiled, suddenly no longer feeling completely alone. He should have known that somebody would be watching him. **"You're safe here until your birthday. Stay and enjoy it. Lily would never forgive me if I let you leave like this."**

* * *

For some unknown reason Harry did as he was told. He didn't go running to meet Voldemort's challenge head on, alone and in vomit covered pyjamas. He was putting it down to delayed shock but he did need time to compose himself before he set out on the road. His aunt washed his dirty clothes and Harry crawled back into bed. He tried to shut off his mind but couldn't sleep, distracted by the hum of the washing machine. Before the nightmare about his parents, when Harry had thought of Severus Snape it had been only of plans to punish him for his betrayal-of how his life of lies and treachery had ruined Harry's life from past to present. Harry had wanted to find him and torture an apology out of him; been convinced that death was simply too good for someone like him; wanted Snape to feel as badly as he did and for a long time. Now Harry wanted answers instead of apologies. He wanted to know if he had kept the letters his mother had written to him during her time in hiding. He wanted to know just why Voldemort had been willing to spare her. He wanted to know what Snape had been doing at Godric's Hollow the night Harry's parents had died. Before Harry would have bet money on Snape attending simply to gloat but in Harry's nightmare he had looked anything but smug. He had shut Harry's dead father's eyes and dug his mother's body out from under the wreckage. In the single memory Harry had seen involving his mother and Snape, he had insulted and upset her. Remus may have told Harry that his mother had had the special gift of seeing the good in others, most especially when they couldn't see it in themselves but Harry thought it would have been impossible to find any good in someone who grew up to murder.

Harry could no longer piece Snape's motives together. The 'Half Blood Prince' had overheard the prophecy which named Harry as Voldemort's conqueror and rushed to tell his master. He had arrived on the murder scene to pay his respects and grieve for his "mudblood" school friend. He had taken a post at Hogwarts under Voldemort's orders and then upon his defeat turned spy to Dumbledore "at great personal risk". He had split himself between Dumbledore's secret society in charge of protecting Harry and the world at large from Voldemort and Voldemort's supporters intent upon killing Harry and cleansing the world of those they viewed as impure. When Dumbledore had returned from destroying a horcrux "desperately injured" he had healed him. After years of refusal Dumbledore had allowed him to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts when it was common knowledge the position was cursed and no professor so far had lasted longer than year. Had Dumbledore wanted Snape out of Hogwarts? On Dumbledore's orders he had done his utmost to discover that task Voldemort had set Draco Malfoy. Despite the fact that both had known all along that Draco planned to murder him he did not expel him in fear that Voldemort would kill him. Hagrid had overheard Snape arguing with Dumbledore and refusing to do as he had asked. He had murdered an unarmed Dumbledore on Draco's behalf whilst Harry was watching, told Harry to close his mind if he ever hoped to defeat Voldemort and then fled the castle. Harry's train of thought was tangled up in knots. Nothing added up.

* * *

Harry watched the sky change from black to beige to blue outside of his window and tried to clear his mind of the sickness, fury and helplessness he felt. He still needed to know that Hermione was alright. At nine, the click in the front door and the revving car engine outside meant that uncle Vernon had gone to work. It was safe to get up. Harry crawled out of bed and tore off his stained shirt. He opened his bedroom door to survey the empty hallway, practically ducked and rolled his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth, wash his face and shower and dashed back all in record time. He closed the door behind himself and made his way back to his bed, freezing as the floorboard in the hall creaked. His door opened and his aunt stepped inside. **"Not been sick again, have you?"** Harry shook his head though he had no desire to eat breakfast. She stared at him for a second or so, where he was standing over his bed smoothing down the duvet, in his striped pyjama bottoms. She passed her gaze over the scars on his shoulders and the healing cuts on his face. **"Where did you get those?"** Harry struggled to remember the origin of every single scar.

**"Fighting probably."** Be it from a teacher trying to strangle him for a stone, a 50-foot snake in an underground chamber, a fleet of Dementors, a fully grown dragon, Voldemort himself in a cemetery or the Department of Ministries or an army of un-dead inferi floating in a flooded cave, Harry had a habit of collecting battle scars. None had come to define him as much as the one on his forehead.

**"I suppose you inherited that from Lily." **Harry couldn't understand when his aunt had become so open with him about the past. When he was growing up the standard response had always been 'don't ask questions'.** "She was always getting into fights, sticking up for people who couldn't do so themselves."** Harry wanted to smile but he knew that the last defenceless individual his mother had chosen to protect was him.

**"Come with me a moment."** An unwilling Harry lost the war with his own curiosity and followed her down the hallway and into the bedroom she shared with uncle Vernon, stopping on the threshold. He had not been inside their bedroom in a long time. Thunder and lightning had always scared him as a child but he had always been barred from their bed. **"Come in."** Harry sighed and moved into the room, standing awkwardly, with no desire to sit down on the bed. The room had so little character a stranger would have had a hard time making any assumptions about Harry's aunt and uncle. Everything was so clean, straight and minimal that Harry suddenly longed to be at the Burrow sat at the crowded dinner table in their warm cluttered love-worn kitchen. **"Sit down."**

**"I don't want to argue-"**The day Harry had returned from Hogwarts, his aunt had asked for a clean slate and he had refused. It was clear she was still making the effort to convince him to change his mind. Harry just couldn't see what good could come from it.

**"I only want to show you something." **Harry fidgeted under his aunt's eyes were green too he noticed but more like ordinary olives than the emeralds he had inherited from Lily.

**"Why are you looking at me like that?"** Harry felt increasingly uncomfortable. Petunia usually did her best not to look at him and was glad to be rid him yet the night before she had begged him to stay. Everything had been turned on its head.

**"You don't look well," **she murmured.

**"I've looked worse,"** Harry said feeling self-conscious about his puffy cheeks and ringed eyes. His aunt tugged nervously at the bed covers and went to the curtains, pulling them open and cracking a window. The soft sounds of children playing in the street outside broke the tense silence in the bedroom. **"I haven't exactly had the best year."**

**"I'm sorry. I'm glad you're back..."** Harry snorted but did his best to believe her because he liked how it felt to be wanted. **"I don't suppose you believe that but it's true. I've never been happier to see you. I've been thinking about you ever since you left with Dumbledore."** Harry was surprised by how easily a name of such magical magnitude slipped from her prejudiced tongue but not by how much it still hurt to hear it. **"Sorry,"** she said when Harry recoiled, **"He left you on your doorstep. I expect he meant a lot to you."**

**"The ones that do always end up dead so ****_you_**** needn't worry," **was the kindest response Harry could muster.

**"Harry," **she sighed reproachfully when he turned to leave.** "I was worried that I might never see you again." **Harry didn't turn around.

**"I bet," **he spat,** "Who would stop the bacon from burning?" **

**"I couldn't stand the idea that you wouldn't be able to take anything good away from your time with me..."** His aunt stammered to a stop, tight lipped and began again. **"You didn't just lose a mother that Halloween, I lost a sister." **Harry was suddenly confronted by the memory that his aunt had always hated Halloween. She had never let Harry dress up. She had always begged neighbourhood mothers to take Dudley trick-or-treating. She had never fallen prey to the desire to decorate or curled up on the sofa with uncle Vernon to watch horror films. She had always shut off the lights, drawn the curtains and done her best to pretend they weren't home. Harry had always thought it was because she hated the idea of him having fun but now he understood. In a world she could never understand a dark wizard had broken down every magical defence to murder her sister and brother in law and done his best to kill her infant nephew. That must have made it difficult for Petunia to surrender herself to a night celebrating the darkness and danger of magic.

* * *

**"Lily died ****_hating_**** me. I don't want history to repeat itself."** She said it with such sincerity that Harry was suddenly the one feeling guilty. He turned around with a sad smile.

**"Mum didn't ****_hate_**** you. ****_I_**** don't hate you. I don't even know you," **Harry assured her honestly. The way his aunt couldn't take her eyes off his scars made it obvious that she did not know anything about Harry either. A huge part of Harry did not want her to. Had he grown up with her parental concern she might never have let him return to Hogwarts.

**"I remember the day you were born,"** Petunia admitted looking over her shoulder at him from where she was standing by the window. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her waist as though she was holding herself together. Harry wondered how long it had been since she had thought of his mother. **"Your father showed up on the doorstep telling me that Lily ****_needed_**** me. He took me to that ****_strange_**** hospital and showed me down to the ward." **Harry's face brightened as he tried to imagine them all brought together by his birth. He wondered which of his parents had kept a level head as the other panicked. "**He was so nervous he barely said a word. I was sure he couldn't stand me. I'd just had Dudley so I suppose Lily thought I could help her through it but...I left before you came into the world."**

**"But mum needed you."** Everything Harry knew about siblings he had learned from the Weasleys but Ginny didn't have any sisters. He didn't understand the intricacies of that kind of closeness.

**"There were...complications. They would have killed anyone else but those people in that weird place..."** Harry had no idea that St. Mungo's had a maternity ward. **"They could just fix anything with one of those wands and a word. Our mother had just died. She'd been sick for years...I guess I couldn't handle that-any of it. Lily had your father and her friends- nothing could hurt her in that world. She didn't need her ****_muggle_**** big sister to look out for her anymore..." **Harry would not feel sorry for her.

**"Bitterness and jealousy? Now she's dead and I'm all grown up. Does it seem worth it?"** After everything with Dumbledore Harry felt colder. He knew that he had to be. Enough people had been taken from him for Harry to be driven to leave everyone he knew before it could happen again. Harry turned to the door.

**"Wait. Cruelty doesn't suit you,"** Petunia crossed the room to take his elbow and walked the pair of them back into the room. She stared down at the long scar which lined Harry's left forearm with a face like she thought he might have done it himself. Harry pulled his arm out of her grip and stuffed his hands into his pyjama pockets. He was not about to explain ancient history. **"Lily was the same. You've got every right to be angry but let me make it up to you."** She had opened the wardrobe in the corner and was standing on her tiptoes rifling through the clothes on the very top shelf as she spoke. Harry shook his head, stumbling on the spot.

**"I don't think that's possible." **His aunt withdrew from the wardrobe clutching a worn cardboard box which was held shut with a peeling strip of duct tape. Apart from Harry himself, it was the most unkempt thing he had ever seen within his aunt's house.

**"Things have changed. You said it yourself. Where's the harm in starting fresh?"** She held the box in her arms like a baby and Harry considered her offer.

**"Better late than never I suppose..."** Harry crumbled at the prospect of the fraying box. They only had a few more months together until Harry's birthday when he would return to the wizarding world and an uncertain future. What could it matter now if they lived amiably, exchanging pleasantries and memories of his mother?

**"Here,"** his aunt thrust the box into his arms and straightened up as though relieved of a giant weight. She turned him in the doorway guiding him out with a soft hand. **"Look at it. Keep it in your bedroom from now on."**

* * *

Inside the box, Harry found a childhood photo album of his aunt's which had perhaps once belonged to his grandparents. Unlike magical photos, none of the subjects moved. For once, Harry was glad of the stillness. It allowed him to drink in every detail of a time from which he was utterly clueless. The first photograph was a peeling Polaroid of his aunt Petunia, newborn and sleeping peacefully in a hospital bed. Written on the back in someone's looping handwriting were the words 'Petunia Harriet Evans- September 20th 1956'. In almost 17 years at no point had his aunt mentioned that she was essentially his namesake. It must have been hard to love him knowing that he was the reason for her sister's death and that there was nothing she could do to stop him from meeting the same end. On the opposite page, another peeling Polaroid showed a baby with a shock of red hair and beautiful green eyes, wide awake and staring inquisitively up at the camera. 'Lily Alice Evans' became Petunia's little sister on 'November 4th 1959' and the sense of responsibility and pride she felt emanated from her in every photograph of the pair of them together. Even with their different hair colours, it was easy to spot the likeness when they stood side by side. Their smiles were identical and they shared a lot of mannerisms and a love for dresses. They seemed joined at the hip and forever in fits of giggles, unable to take a serious photograph. For a moment the photographs filled Harry with a warm joy but when that subsided he was left with a bitter hollowness. If his mother and aunt had never had anything in common it would have made it easier to understand Petunia's refusal to speak of her. The album made it clear that the reason it hurt his aunt so much to be reminded of Lily was because she had loved her so fiercely.

* * *

The turning point for their relationship could be defined within one photograph. Lily was sitting at the kitchen table with her hair in a messy plait wearing pyjamas. Half of her face was hidden behind the torn open Hogwarts invitation letter she was holding up to the camera. For once Petunia was not glued to her side. She was standing with her back to the kitchen counter staring off into the distance as though she could see all that was to come. Then there were less and less photos of Lily and Petunia together. They were no longer dressed alike or pressed together in childish hugs and their identical smiles rarely made an appearance. The back of a portrait of Harry's mother and father on their wedding day read 'You were missed Pet. Love the Potters.' A photo of himself as a newborn read 'Say hello to your nephew, love the Potters'. Inside a plastic pocket on the inside of the back cover was a newspaper cut-out about a gas explosion in a southern village named Godric's Hollow. Its brevity was representative of the effect their deaths had on the muggle world but the paper was so crinkled that Harry knew his aunt had memorised that paragraph about 'a mysterious green light' and the 'destruction' of their 'cottage' on October 31st, 1981. Harry closed the album. There was nothing more to see. His mother had died at 21 and Petunia had taken in her only son and locked every thought of her sister away in a box where it could never hurt her again.

A small gold whistle on a delicate chain was curled into the corner of the cardboard box. The flat top was engraved with small flowers and the bottom bore the initials 'L.E.'. Harry raised it to his lips and blew but didn't get a sound. He slung it around his neck. It was light and cool on his skin and it felt natural for it to be there, beside his heart. A letter with the Hogwarts wax seal caught Harry's eye. It was addressed to Petunia. Inside the envelope Dumbledore's tidy handwriting told Petunia 'thank you' for her request to come to Hogwarts but that she unfortunately bore no magical ability-that magic was a gift she had not inherited but she would inherit many others, each as wonderful as the next, whilst upon her path, much separate from her sister's. Harry smiled as he read it. It was the first time since his death that something regarding Dumbledore had made him happy and Harry thought that was special. He kept the box beneath his bed and read through the letter whenever he was feeling particularly down. Dumbledore was so kind and Petunia so full of childish hope.

* * *

Harry's mood may have been lifted but his health declined. The sickness which he had felt on the train and had returned with his nightmare seemed to take root inside of him. He was sick often in the middle of the night and could barely keep food down. He jumped in and out of uncomfortable periods of insomnia and increasingly horrific nightmares involving raging seas, lakes filled with inferi and Dumbledore begging for death, as well as his parents torn apart by the killing curse. When he did sleep it was with his wand clutched tightly in hand. More than once he had woken suddenly and accidentally set fire to his curtains, frightened by the shadows cast upon his window by the street lamps and the trees. Strangest of all was the sensation of being looked after. His aunt Petunia became his attentive nurse, forcing him medicine and bringing him meals in bed. With every visit she let slip more and more childhood memories of Lily which warmed Harry more than the broths or herbal teas. **"I remember one letter from when she was sixteen...She needed advice because she was sure she was falling in love with your father but he was such a mess at the time. She was scared of disappointing him-breaking his heart...but it was obvious, even to me, that they were meant to be together."** As much as Harry loved hearing about his parents, he couldn't help but hate it too. Only having other people's recollections of them to love had been bearable, before his far too realistic nightmare had shown him just how they glowed when they were together. Now every anecdote of their love was laced with the underlying subtext that Harry had ruined it.

* * *

He had also still gotten no reply from Hermione and was sure by insisting that she return home he had sent her to her death. The guilt expanded within him like a bubble. It had been swelling within some hidden recess of his since Cedric had died when he was fifteen. Usually he papered over it with a joyous return to Hogwarts and the comforting arms of his friends, but he had not heard from either so far and it seemed unsure whether Hogwarts would reopen at all. Perhaps it would have been for the best if it didn't. Then at least he could avoid the guilt he associated with the girl he had fallen for under its enchanted ceiling; Ginny. The more Harry heard about his parents, the more he felt increasingly guilty about the way he had broken it off with his best friend's sister. She deserved better than the few months of love he had allowed himself to give her. There was still a box in his head overflowing with the kind of things he knew would make her laugh and he didn't know what to do with them. He was lucky at least that nothing in the muggle world could remind him of her. Still, every time the phone rang, he longed to find her on the other end. He wanted every knock on the front door to be hers, turning up out of the blue to rescue him. However more than either of those things, Harry hoped that she understood. He knew it would have been best for her to forget about him, and by the lack of letters she was doing well, but the task of forgetting about her seemed impossible. Removing his feelings from Ginny was harder than he had thought it would be. Harry was just too genuine for a facade. He couldn't turn his emotions on and off but if that was what it would take to keep her safe-to keep her living, then he would have to learn and fast. He had spent numerous sleepless nights and days he was supposed to be gardening or washing the dishes, doing as he had once been taught and attempting to clear his mind. Ginny Weasley's large brown eyes, dusting of freckles and red hair always invaded. Harry could not help but love her more than he was allowed.

* * *

The year before last Harry had spent all of two weeks at Privet Drive simmering silently over Sirius's untimely death before he was rescued by Dumbledore. This year Harry was left simmering silently over Dumbledore's untimely death and with no one left to rescue him. Whilst at times it did feel good to be there, in the muggle world, away from everything that was happening in the Prophet, sometimes Harry still felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, strangers craned their necks to catch a glimpse of him and it seemed that there was more to see than he could leaving Harry sure that he was losing his mind. The knowledge that his aunt had booked a cruise for herself, uncle Vernon and Dudley which left the day before Harry's 17th birthday put Harry's mind somewhat at ease. The lack of contact with his best friends did not. He suspected that they had been banned from writing to him for security reasons but he still scanned the Daily Prophet terrified of reading their names amongst those of the missing or dead.

Harry skimmed over tributes to Dumbledore. He read intently about the new Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour's plans for a big shakeup at the Ministry. There were reports of daily arrests, investigations and trials for suspicious behaviour and general hiring and firing of new extensively screened employees. There were improvements in Auror Training Programs. Experts had been drafted in from across the globe to fight back against 'the evil invading the country'. With Scrimgeour in charge and flaunting his acceptance of Voldemort's return as a challenge, The Prophet was a different paper altogether. Reports of Deatheater brutality were no longer veiled but blown up across the front page. Harsh reality had taken the place of Fudge's comfortable denial and Harry couldn't stand it. After everything he had done and seen last year at Dumbledore's side, he sometimes resented being babysat by the Dursely's whilst his friends and their family worked within a secret organisation, created by Dumbledore, to combat Voldemort. They were risking life and limb whilst Harry, the only one capable of actually defeating Voldemort, was trimming hedgerows, hanging laundry, eating homemade cheesecake and helping Mrs Figg groom her cats. He was consumed by guilt.

* * *

Despite, the nightly spring cleanings of his mind, Dumbledore's death always seemed to slip through the cracks. Harry had been living on what felt like an emergency supply of positivity and reoccurring dreams of Dumbledore and his parents and sickness brought with them drained the last of it. Hearing his own mother beg not for her life but his and Sirius who had always been so strong, sobbing over Harry's father's body was more than enough to inspire sleepless nights. If Harry had taken one good thing from the sickening vision he had encountered, it was the knowledge that his mother _had_ loved him. He had spent so many of his earlier days at the Dursley's doubting the fact but his parents had adored him and uprooted and sacrificed their young lives for him. Since Dumbledore's funeral, he had been finding it harder than usual to convince himself that he was satisfied with the lot he had been dealt-that he didn't wish he had joined his parents under the steaming rubble of their hideout sixteen years ago. Seeing how at barely one year old Harry had stared down the darkest wizard in the world, had swiftly changed his mind. Death was the easy way out and not the right way to deal with the destiny which Voldemort had bound to him. The idea of confronting that destiny came with a sense of unbearable hopelessness. Dumbledore had always insisted that he had all that he needed to defeat Voldemort-that when the Mirror of Erised had shown eleven year old Harry's greatest desire to be his parents instead of riches or immortality that was proof that he was pure of heart. It had proven nothing to Harry apart from the fact that he was already rich from his inheritance and that the idea of immortality had never appealed to him because his loved ones were long dead. Dumbledore had been wrong about Harry and he'd been wrong about Snape.

The Prophet detailed public outcry at the Ministry's inability to catch him. There were raids upon Malfoy Manor. Malfoy's mother Narcissa no longer looked cold and stiff like a statue. She was in floods of tears as ministry employees tore through her dead son's things. She claimed to have no knowledge that her son had conspired with Snape to murder Dumbledore and was adamant that she had not seen either of them since. Surely Snape was living in hiding with Voldemort and the rest of his Deatheaters in comfort and luxury whilst Malfoy's body decayed. The thought of it was enough to make Harry sick again. He knew now that every bad thing Malfoy had done that year was out of love. Snape however had killed Dumbledore with an expression of utter revulsion. In the years they had known one another, Harry had seen no evidence that Snape's limited repertoire of emotions even stretched to love. The Prophet article on the fire at his muggle home only served to cement the fact. There were walls upon walls of burnt books on the Dark Arts, potions making and medieval magic and torture, an empty wardrobe, and not a single personal artefact or family photograph. Harry could not imagine him living in a house with a fireplace adorned with photos of his loved ones as his aunt Petunia did. Harry could not imagine him having loved ones. In Harry's eyes he no longer deserved them and if Harry had been one of them he'd have disowned him. Snape would never grow to deserve the expansive funeral Dumbledore had received. Harry hoped that no stone was laid to commemorate him; that nobody gathered to say their goodbyes; that there was nobody waiting to greet him happily in the afterlife except Harry's parents with faces heavy with disappointment and disdain and Dumbledore in need of answers to his betrayal. Harry slept well that night.

* * *

All through June, Petunia had dished out extra scrambled eggs with Harry's breakfast, bought him anything he lingered over when dragged shopping, got him those biscuits he liked whenever she found herself in the supermarket and continued to do his laundry. **"This shirt is ruined. The...blood just wouldn't come out. I've tried everything,"** his aunt said, coming into his room with a full laundry basket balanced on her right hip.** "Maybe you know of a way to get it out."** She placed the laundry basket on the floor by his bed and crossed her arms. She didn't mind that Harry had taken to wearing her sister's old whistle and had replaced the photo of James and Lily on his bedside cabinet.

**"The blood wasn't mine..."** Harry told her in what had been an attempt at reassurance. **"There was an accident. I almost killed...another student."** It was strange to think of Malfoy now that he was dead but Harry was sure that at this rate he had to know more people who were dead than alive.

**"I always said that magic was dangerous,"** his aunt remarked darkly and Harry looked up at her sadly.

**"It can be...but it helps more than it hinders,"** he explained with a smile as he thought of the many times thinking on his feet, Hermione's knowledge, Dumbledore's intervention and prolonged infirmary trips had saved him from death.

**"I haven't seen that..."** she uttered and swept out of the room. Harry felt instantly miserable. He wanted to show his aunt the beauty and good that there was in magic but could think of no way how until he could legally use it when he came of age at the end of July.

* * *

Days seemed impossibly sluggish. His aunt's mixture of TLC and hot spicy liquids had flushed all illness out of Harry and his occlumency practices before bed almost allowed him to sleep until sunrise. Harry was glad because it meant that he longer had to fight the urge to tell his aunt why he was crying for his mother in the middle of the night. He was up and out of bed without a trace of fever or fatigue and dividing his waking hours between thought filled silence, menial housework, helping his aunt Petunia, stealing his uncle's newspapers and reading the Daily Prophet cover to cover. He endured the unfamiliar sensation of family dinners with the Dursleys-talk of the drill factory Grunnings where his uncle worked, discussions of their upcoming cruise and upgrading the house or moving all together once Dudley was done with college and of what Dudley and Harry planned to do once education was over. Harry even enjoyed the odd kick around with Dudley. He hoped that it was not a slice of normality too late. A part of him was terrified of feeling anything but sadness at Privet Drive because when Harry was happy somebody usually swooped in and killed that happiness right in front of him. He did his best to keep a suitable distance from his relatives but his aunt wanted to make amends and she always had questions. **"What's that?"** she asked him one evening as he was sitting with them, as they watched the television. Harry had been away with his thoughts, fiddling with the fake golden Slytherin locket, he now carried with him everywhere.

**"A reminder,"** Harry had replied cryptically and Vernon had turned back to the television with a snort.

**"Of a girl?"** his aunt had asked kindly.

**"I suppose so."** Harry hadn't said anything more and his aunt had returned to watching the television and stroking her hands through her husband's hair. Harry had sat there thinking of a girl but for once it wasn't Ginny. He thought of Voldemort's mother, Merope Gaunt and as much as he tried to hate her for what she had created, all Harry could feel was pity. He wondered if the reason Voldemort couldn't understand love was because he was conceived under the influence of a love potion. Had his muggle father realised that Merope didn't care for his money or his status and loved her in return, instead of being consumed by vanity and ultimately abandoning her, things would things have been different now? Had Tom Riddle grown up loved, would he have gone on to love stopping Voldemort from ever flowering into being? Were the Dursleys, Dumbledore, Hermione, Ron and his family, Remus and Sirius the only differences between orphaned Harry Potter and orphaned Tom Riddle? Harry knew it couldn't be that simple but too much television had him wishing it was. Dumbledore had always insisted that love was the key to understanding all things.


	5. Chapter 5 Sheltering Summer Shattered

Chapter 6

**The Sheltering Summer Shattered**

The Prophet brought some semblance of good news in announcing plans for Hogwarts reopening. The Board of Governors demanded the school reopen and educate future generations of wizarding children in the eve of war. Like the Ministry, under new management the school would also undergo a transformation. The parts of the school which had been destroyed at the Battle of the Tower had been rebuilt by teams of ex and current students and professors. McGonagall was listed as Headmistress and Head of Gryffindor. Slughorn would return as Potions Master and become Head of Slytherin. 'Auror Nymphadora Tonks' was on board as assistant Transfiguration professor and Head of School Security. The search for a new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor was 'ongoing' and the uncertainty left Harry uneasy. So far there had been a talented actor with Voldemort living in the back of his head, a fraudster whose only talent was for memory charms, a charming werewolf, a Deatheater in disguise intent upon murdering Harry and a traitorous killer who had succeeded in murdering their headmaster. Harry did not want to think about the kind of dangerous character ready to crawl out of the woodwork this year to claim the teaching post under dubious intentions.

* * *

One morning mid July like so many mornings before, Hedwig delivered Harry's Daily Prophet, but only barely. She struck the window and tumbled across the carpet, dropping the paper. Her left wing was crooked and she was missing chunks of feathers. Harry ignored the paper with its blaring headlines and tenderly inspected his wounded pet. The Order had been right not to write to Harry. Someone had grabbed Hedwig. Harry leaned out of his window to eye the back garden, empty except for an unattended bottle of plant feed and the equally empty opposing streets. Hedwig screeched loudly in pain as Harry made to lift her. He retreated, apologizing and at a loss. He and still underage and had never managed to master healing spells with the same vigour as Hermione. **"What's wrong with your owl?"** Aunt Petunia stepped into the room, staring at Hedwig where she was perched on Harry's dresser. **"I saw it practically crash into your window."**

**"Someone's grabbed her. It's pretty common for letters to be intercepted that way. Maybe I should take her to Mrs Figg. She'll know what to do."** Old women always knew how to heal hurt.

**"With all those cats? Don't be silly." **Harry had not considered the furry wannabe assassins which lived within the nooks and crannies of Mrs. Figg's small home. **"I can fix her up. I'll be right back."** His aunt left his room removing her gardening gloves and when she returned it was with a small first aid box. She took Hedwig up with expert hands and sat down on the bed stroking tenderly from Hedwig's beak, over her head and down her back. Harry stood watching curiously as Hedwig calmed and his aunt stretched out her injured wing. **"There's a little cut which could do with cleaning. It should heal on its own. The rest is just bruising."** She dipped a piece of gauze in antiseptic and wiped it across the bleeding wound. Hedwig fidgeted and his aunt soothed her again with soft caresses and whispering like she was a baby. **"Harry, won't you pick up that photo album? If I'd known you take so little care of other people's possessions I would never have given it to you."** Harry followed his aunt's gaze. He had knocked the childhood album she had borrowed him onto the floor when he had leaned out of the window.

**"Sorry."** Harry picked up the album, stuffing the scattered photographs back inside. He had torn through it so often he was beginning to feel like he had been there. The album Hagrid had given him at the end of his first year at Hogwarts was now so love-worn it was spello-taped together.

**"You should probably keep her inside for a couple of days to give that wing a little rest but she's going to be fine,"** his aunt assured him. Hedwig was perched upon her arm eyes shut and cooing softly.

**"Thanks...How do you know how to do all of this?"** Harry asked as he transferred Hedwig from his aunt's arm into her cage. He bent down to pick up a photograph from his aunt's album which had almost become lost beneath his bed.

**"Lily and I always loved animals when we were little...Every summer we volunteered at animal shelters. We were always bringing home strays and begging to keep them."**

* * *

Harry was too distracted by someone he had spotted in the back of the photograph in his hand to take in his aunt's reply. The photograph showed his mother Lily seated at the kitchen table. She looked about twelve and she was smiling, wide, the way young children do for photographs. Behind her standing at the sink with soapy hands was a stringy young boy with sallow skin, sharp cheekbones and chin length black hair. **"Who is this?"** Harry handed the photograph to his aunt. **"Standing at the sink?"** His aunt's nostalgic smile was replaced by a tight lipped frown.

**"The last of Lily's strays. He lived down the street from us. He went to your school with her. They met the very same day she got her letter..." **Harry's face twisted into a tighter expression with every word.** "She was out all day, got home late to babysit me because ma and pa were going out to dinner. She told me that she'd met a boy. 'You won't believe it Pet' she said 'but he can do magic!'I didn't believe it." **

**"Do you remember his name?"** Harry knew what the answer would be.

**"It was something strange-"**Petunia struggled to remember. Her sister's killers had always been faceless dark wizards hidden behind a wax seal and a train platform and Harry wondered whether that came as a comfort or a concern.

**"Severus?"**

**"Yes..." **Harry's aunt stared at him as if she was wondering how he could have plucked such an obscure name out of thin air-whether he had known the boy from the photograph in the world from which she was barred**. "Lily always called him Rus and Sev ad Er whenever he was unkind. She was always giving him her favourite books."** Harry didn't smile. He didn't like the idea that such innocent beginnings had come to tragic ends and Petunia didn't have a clue. **"Before that letter Lily and I were always together- we bickered, all sisters do but we were ****_best_**** friends. Those two lived in each other's pockets. Out all day down by this lake near our house or in his room or hers or he'd be invited to dinner. He was so skinny and pale. I think ma felt sorry for him..." **Harry's feeling towards Snape had fuelled many adventures but now all could feel was betrayed.** "And I think she was glad that Lily wouldn't be going into that ****_world_**** on her own. I remember at the station before they got on that red steam train, pa took that boy aside and I didn't hear exactly what was said but I think he was just asking him to promise to take care of Lily."**

Harrylistened but none of it was what he wanted to hear. Snape had broken his promise to the grandfather Harry had never met and it was just another thing Harry would demand an apology for. **"And when did they stop being friends?"** Harry asked.

**"I don't know if they ever did. The summer after her last year Lily only came back to collect her things. Then she moved straight in with your father...I always wondered what happened to that odd skinny boy because after your mother died I knew he had to be the only person left who had loved her as much as I did." **Harry considered lying to save her feelings.

**"He used to work at Hogwarts and he hated my guts."** His aunt Petunia cocked an eyebrow.

**"Well you never love anyone as much as you love your first real friend do you?" **Harry loved Ron and Hermione beyond measure. They were misfits just as it was becoming clear his beautiful mother and her Slytherin friend Snape had been misfits before them. "**He probably hated your father too."** Harry snorted and stopped pacing, bitterness bubbling up and out of him.

**"The whole time he was supposed to be on Dumbledore's side-his double spy. Everybody else doubted him but Dumbledore trusted him for a reason he wouldn't share," **Harry explained, just as clueless about this secret as he had ever been.

**"Well some things can't be cheapened by sharing them-"**

**"He ****_murdered_**** Dumbledore: injured and unarmed. He did it right in front of me.**" His aunt looked down at the photograph, as though she could not imagine that the boy with the dark eyes who had stood at her mother's sink had grown up to be a killer.

**"You've seen so much..."** She handed back the photograph and Harry stuffed it wordlessly back into the album. His aunt got up off of the bed with the first aid box in hand and stood by the door picking Hedwig's white feathers from her skirt. **"You never know what children will become, you just hope that whatever it is, they'll be loved..." **Harry did not hope that Snape was loved.** "When I found you on the doorstep I didn't know whether to keep you. You had Lily's eyes and your father's hair and you kept asking for him and asking for him, 'papa', 'papa', 'papa' all of the time as though Lily had never existed...but you were a stray and we had always taken them in...It took a long time for you to stop asking for your father. I never wanted to have to tell you they'd been murdered..."** Harry no longer begrudged her that. He had now seen enough murders to make up for those years of blissful ignorance. He didn't want to tell her about any of them. The way she imagined her sister dying had to be better than the truth.

* * *

The same day Hedwig was attacked Harry was pulled out of silent contemplation by an event which had never occurred before within the walls of number four Privet Drive. **"Harry! Phone!"** His uncle Vernon bellowed up the stairs so loudly that it could not have been a mistake. He had barely spoken to Harry since he had made his wife cry and had left the receiver sitting on the table in the landing. Harry took the phone into the empty cupboard under the stairs, switching on the light with no idea who could possibly be on the other end of his first phone-call.

**"Hello?"** Holding the receiver up to his ear felt more alien than apparition. Harry wondered whether his wishes about Ginny had somehow come true.

**"Harry!"** Harry was bowled over by the sound of her voice. He sank into a sitting position on the stairs with a sigh. **"It's Hermione."**

**"I was expecting Voldemort,"** Harry explained in a quiet voice failing to drag a laugh out of her. **"Why have you never rang me before? It's really good to talk to you."**

**"I'm sorry. I'm sure everyone would disapprove of me calling but I didn't want you doing anything rash because we haven't been in contact. Security's trebled without..." **She could not even bring herself to say Dumbledore's name**. "I didn't think the Deatheaters would have the sense to bug muggle technology..."**

**"I doubt my aunt's neighbourhood gossip would give them much to go on. I was so worried about you-"**

**"Never mind me! McGonagall said that you tried to leave! Too much has happened for you to make a break for it on your own Harry. For better or worse, we're in this together now."**

**"I'm sorry. It was a rough night...but you're right, as always," **Harry sighed picking at the initials he had carved into the steps above his head.

**"But you're okay now, aren't you? You sound sick."** Her letters were usually filled with instructions on the importance of a balanced diet and regular sleep pattern during the holidays.

**"I was but nothing serious. I'm better. Don't worry. What about you? Where are you?"**

**"I'm...good. I've just come back from holiday with my parents...and I just...needed to know that you were okay,"** Hermione trailed off. They had not spoken since the day of Dumbledore's funeral and she still sounded just as distraught.

**"Hermione, tell me what's wrong."** Hermione sighed and then in a stammering voice, holding back teas she confessed her fears for her parents after the attacks on the tube station which had been far too close to her home for comfort.

**"I'm not strong or brave like you Harry. I couldn't cope with that kind of loss."** Harry felt helpless at the end of a phone in a cupboard under some stairs but did his best to comfort her.

**"Listen to me, Hermione. You are ****_not_**** going to lose them. Nothing is going to happen to them."** There were a few sniffling breaths and then it seemed that she had pulled herself together.

**"I know it isn't. Just promise me that you'll stay put with your aunt and uncle, even though you hate it there. Ron and I will always be waiting. Harry, promise me!" **Harry was put off by her tone.

**"I promise Hermione." **He couldn't stand the idea of her being upset and wanted nothing more than to be with his best friends.

**"I'm sorry Harry but I've got to go. You won't be able to reach me on this number again...but I'll try to call you soon. Try to stay out of trouble ****_please_****. Goodbye."** Harry had wanted to discuss everything he had read in the paper but Hermione was gone as suddenly as she had called. Her letters were always so long that the shortness of her conversation seemed out of character

* * *

Every day for the next week Harry rushed to the stairs the moment the phone rang but it was never for him. He couldn't stop thinking about the way Hermione had said 'for better or worse'. He did not want to think about the 'worse'. Harry had been a self imposed hermit for days by the time the last week of July brought with it Dudley's seventeenth birthday. He did not count his presents as he had done on his eleventh but they were still numerous and large. He tore into a brand new computer and stereo system, a motorbike and seemingly endless amounts of expensive designer clothes and accessories. His mother cooked him all of his favourite foods all day. Whilst Dudley spent the afternoon with his father at a golf course and then a shooting range, Harry helped his aunt Petunia with baking his cousin's birthday cake. **"It's strange: your coming of age at seventeen,"** his aunt Petunia said in between cleaning of the kitchen surfaces as they waited for the cake to bake. **"Do you feel like an adult?"**

**"Yeah."** Harry's years of childish obliviousness were over. The last of his protectors had died and now it was time for him to face his fears. He listened to his aunt but did not speak much as he had not slept. He was exhausted and did not want to have to remember any of Dudley's previous birthdays in which he had been chased up trees by his Aunt Marge's vicious dogs, pummelled with things or locked in his cupboard for days after unleashing a giant snake upon the zoo-going public. Harry slept through Dudley's birthday dinner and when he came downstairs his aunt and uncle had been banished.

**"I'm having my mates round for a party**." The new computer and stereo system had been set up and one of Dudley's new CD's was ready to be unleashed upon the clueless neighbours.

**"Oh right. I'll be in my room. I won't be any trouble-"** Harry headed back upstairs but was cut off by his cousin.

**"You can stay-"**Taken aback as he was,Harry just didn't find the prospect of sitting in a room with a bunch of muggle teenagers he didn't know as they drank and did whatever else all that inviting.

**"Thanks but I should-"**

**"I go to school and I come out with good grades and career prospects. You go to school and you come out with new scars, screaming a different person's name in your sleep...So stay?" **

Harry stayed and Dudley introduced him as his "cousin Harry". When his friends asked why they'd never seen him before Dudley told them that it was because Harry went to boarding school. **"What's your school called?"**One of Dudley's friends asked as they sat in the living room drinking and listening to loud music. The guy had gelled back brown hair and blue eyes and he seemed to be the toughest of the group. Dudley had introduced everyone but Harry had trouble remembering their names.

**"Uh...Hogwarts-"**

**"No shit, man!"** the guy sat back laughing out loud and everyone else sniggered as though they weren't sure if Harry was being serious.

**"Sounds like an asylum!"** said the thin, baby faced boy who was sitting on the rug, flicking his cigarette ash into the fireplace, **"They got girls there?"** Harry nodded but didn't elaborate. **"I hit a sore spot? Oh sorry man. Sorry. No more school talk-"**

**"That's alright,"** Harry said, shaking his head as he was offered a cigarette, **"It's a good school. It's just-"**

**"Full of assholes?"** the tough guy asked and Harry chuckled feeling the effects of the three bottles he had downed to dim the awkwardness of earlier conversation.

**"Yeah...four different kinds."** There were three boys and two girls and it was clear from the way they looked at Harry that they thought he was a little strange.

**"What kind are you?"** the tough guy asked intrigued.

**"The kind with scars,"** Harry said, unsure whether they could understand the concepts of founders.

**"How did you get this scar?"** Harry was sitting on the floor and a girl sitting behind him on the sofa reached around to place a finger on his forehead. Dudley stared across at him. Harry turned to look up at the girl whose hair was hanging down and tickling the back of his neck. She was thin and pale with long blonde hair and big brown eyes. Her name was Rachel.

**"Someone...gave it to me,"** Harry explained slowly, taking another gulp from the bottle in his hand. The occupants of the living room eyed one another.

**"That's heavy man,"** the tough guy said and everyone murmured in agreement.

**"So your school has got hot girls, four different kinds of asshole ****_and_**** knife fights? Where do I sign up?"** The baby faced guy jumped to his feet with his hand to his forehead in salute but he'd had too much to drink. He fell over his own feet, knocking his bottle everywhere. It sprayed Harry and Rachel and put out the tough guy's cigarette but he didn't get angry. Everybody burst out laughing and Rachel dragged Harry into the kitchen in search of some hand towels to dry off. They stood in the dull lull of the drum and bass of the track currently playing loudly on the stereo in the next room. Rachel wiped her hands, chest and neck clean and then crossed the room to press a towel to Harry's wet face. She dried his glasses and then his forehead, stopping to stare up at his scar.

**"It hardly looks real,"** she said, touching it with her fingers again.

**"Sometimes I wish it wasn't,"** Harry said, slowly becoming aware of the palpable tension between him and this girl he knew nothing about. He thought about how easy it would be to date her until his birthday and then disappear. He'd go and live in a world she knew nothing about and she'd forget about him. Unlike his relationship with Ginny, it'd be simple.

**"Everybody's got scars, just not everybody's are on the outside,"** she said as she drew closer and Harry turned his head away**, "Scars are just proof that once you stopped bleeding-that you're alive..." **The baby face and the other girl came stumbling into the kitchen.

**"I love this song! Rachel, come dance with me!" **Rachel was dragged away and Harry stood alone in the kitchen clutching the damp hand towel and thinking about other people's scars.

**"I think Rachel's into you,"** Dudley said as he came into the kitchen. He leaned down to take more bottles of beer from the fridge.

**"Don't be stupid-"**

**"Gorgeous and perfect not your type?"** Harry said nothing and stared out of the kitchen door at the dining room table, thinking of the Weasleys and one in particular.

**"Got a girl back at school?"** Dudley asked, slurring his words and already quite drunk but seemingly enjoying his birthday.

**"Kind of," **was all Harry could reply.

**"Explains why you keep going back I suppose,"** Dudley said. Harry smiled but wasn't happy. He did not know if he would be going back this year and if he did it would not be for Ginny.

* * *

Harry followed Dudley back into the kitchen, back to the kids he didn't know and the music and the dancing and the forgetting. Harry downed every drink he was handed and listened to their conversations about people he had never heard of, laughing when he was supposed to laugh and asking questions when he felt he was supposed to ask them. He danced with Rachel. Nobody asked anything more about Hogwarts or his plans for the future. Rachel mentioned that she wanted to be a nurse. When she asked Harry what he wanted to be he told her that he just wasn't sure. She told him that he looked like a writer. Harry thought of all of the stories he could tell them and how they wouldn't believe any of them. They left Privet Drive for the park where Harry had spent so many summers sitting on the swings alone as Dudley and his gang bullied the younger kids until they ran home to their mothers. Except this time Harry wasn't alone and he wasn't thinking about Cedric, Sirius, Dumbledore or Voldemort. He didn't care about the danger of being out of bounds of protective charms of the fact that they were breaking his aunt's curfew. Harry was too busy finally enjoying himself.

* * *

Harry woke up on his bedroom floor late into the afternoon with a phone number and Rachel's name written on the inside of his arm in permanent marker. He scrubbed it off in the shower and he no longer felt the happy apathy of the night before. Dudley was seventeen and he was still Harry Potter with a deadly mission to fulfil, an evil wizard to vanquish and a lot of lives weighing down on his shoulders. He was in the bathroom thinking about it all for so long it got too hot. He ended up sat down on the toilet seat with the window open wishing he'd kept one of the cigarettes from last night. **"Harry? Not being sick again?"** His aunt Petunia rapped on the door. Harry had no doubt that she's been up for hours deep cleaning the house of all those cigarette fumes, drink stains and general teenager germs. She'd probably cleaned around Harry in his own room.

**"No. I'll be out in a second."** He knew she only wanted in the bathroom so that she could continue her manic cleaning spree. He got dressed quickly and passed her in the doorway.

**"Breakfast is on the table."** The living room was spotless. No evidence of a party remained in the kitchen or dining room either, apart from Dudley, looking worse for wear with his head resting on the dining room table.

**"How's the head ****_Big D_****?"** Harry slapped Dudley on the back playfully and sat down.

**"Big..."** he groaned in reply. He had pushed away his plate of breakfast. It must have been the only time in his whole life Harry had ever seen Dudley refuse a meal.

**"Good thing birthdays are only once a year I guess."**

**"Totally. You had a good night, though?"** Dudley asked, raising his head and staring at him as he tucked into the first thing he'd eaten since breakfast the day before.

**"I did, yeah."** Dudley smiled and returned his forehead to the table. He spent the rest of the day throwing up but he didn't get a shred of sympathy from his mother. Harry did all he could to stay occupied and ignore the vicious headache which rivalled only the pain which had used to stem from his scar. He read his schoolbooks from the year before, put away his laundry and helped his aunt with the gardening.

**"Harry."** Harry was sitting cross legged beside the rose bushes staring at the photograph of Snape at his grandparent's sink as though waiting for the boy in the photograph to open his mouth and tell him the answers to all of his questions about him. **"Honestly if I'd known you were going to be such little help."** Aunt Petunia leaned across him to pick up her discarded shears. **"You say that strange boy-he became a killer for...the man who killed your mother?"** Petunia asked and Harry nodded. **"He never used to let anybody say a bad word about Lily. What changed? Why on earth would he do anything for that man?"**

**"I don't know...It doesn't make any sense."**

**"Not much in that world does."** Harry couldn't fathom how a half-blood boy who had grown up on the same street as his muggle born mother and spent half a decade as her protective best friend had come to be the reason for her death and a supporter of her murderer. Harry silently cleared away the clippings from the rose bushes and then trudged up the stairs to his bedroom where he shut the door, slipped the photo back into Hagrid's album and let Hedwig out for a short fly. Her wing was all but healed and even though Harry had not had a paper in several days he was still anxious to let her out knowing that someone out there planned to hurt her. He was going a little mad with cabin fever by the evening, staring at himself in the mirror and thinking of his father calling him his 'little man', when Dudley came in and suggested a kick-around.

A tabby cat Harry recognised with markings above its eyes like spectacles, was sitting on the garden wall. Harry petted the cat with a smile. The walk was slow and quiet and the kick around short. Dudley had to stop to throw up. Instead they lay in the grass behind the park, smoking cigarettes and staring up at the darkening sky. A change of scenery was exactly what Harry had needed but he could not run away as easily from his thoughts. Dumbledore occupied many of them. Harry tried not to think of the potion he had forced him to drink in the cave but the mystery of what had happened to his withered hand had never been fully explained. What kind of curse could to that to someone? How had Snape known how to heal him? Had he still been slowly dying? Was that why he had pressed Harry for the memory from Slughorn? Was that why he had finally allowed Snape the cursed teaching position? Did he know he was living on borrowed time and that no matter what happened Snape would not be at Hogwarts at the end of the year? Had Snape known that he might die by the end of the year? Had Snape gone with him when he had travelled in search of Voldemort's horcruxes? What had he asked him to do that he didn't want to do? **"You're always staring off into space. What you thinking about?"** Dudley asked, pushing himself up onto his elbows, instantly feeling sick and lying back down again. Harry opened his eyes to a sky filled with the beginnings of stars. The day had gone by quickly and Harry was glad.

**"Mysteries-"**Dudley jumped to his feet and threw up again, doubled over by the fence which ran around the park.

**"Put me out of my misery won't you Harry?"** Harry watched in disgust as Dudley wiped sick from his chin with his arm. If Dudley had really been dying Harry might of-That was it! Perhaps Dumbledore had already been dying from the curse which had been inflicted upon his hand. He knew that Draco planned to murder him and he also knew that because of the curse on the job Snape would no longer be teaching at Hogwarts by the end of the year. Suddenly all of the pieces were coming together in Harry's head to form a big and disturbing picture. That was what they had argued about which Snape had not wanted to do. It made sense that Dumbledore had asked Snape to finish him off, cementing his status as Voldemort's favourite and saving Draco from becoming a killer but for what?

* * *

Harry had been pacing up and down as Dudley stared at him and stopped dead with a hand to his head as he reached the last stop of his train of thought. Of course his theory all relied upon the fact that Dumbledore had been right to trust Snape and that he had always been on their side. After seeing the hatred in Snape's face when he had cast the killing curse on Dumbledore's weakened body made that harder to believe than anything else. Would Harry have hated Dumbledore if he had been asked the same thing-to murder a friend, a mentor, somebody he respected? He couldn't- Harry's mouth dropped open. **"More mysteries?"** Dudley asked and Harry shook his head and raised a finger to point at the sky. A flume of black smoke was spiralling into the air far too close to Privet Drive for comfort. Harry and Dudley ran as fast their legs and Dudley's sensitive stomach would carry them. Dumbledore and Snape were temporarily forgotten. Harry's heart was in his throat, terrified that his relatives had been killed by Deatheaters. Harry and his cousin found themselves out of breath, hiding behind a bush in the heat of Mrs Figg's front garden as her home burnt to the ground. A stream of cats came darting out of the house and between their legs. Harry made to clamber over the bush and into the house to look for the old women who had come to his rescue two summers ago. **"You can't go in there!"** Dudley pulled him back and Harry fell straight back into the bush scratching his arms. They were both staring at Mrs Figg where she was standing on her front lawn. Her hair, face and clothes were black with smoke and she was holding the burnt bodies of two large cats. Harry again tried to stand up as Mrs Figg spotted him lying in her hedgerow.

**"Harry! Get out of here-"**She had barely finished before she was throwing the two dead cats into the air and shrieking as a shadow the size of two men descended upon her. Harry recognized the shadow instantly-the dark hair, strong hairy arms and bared teeth of Fenrir Greyback. He tore down the frail body of Mrs Figg and howled at the moon. It wasn't full but that didn't stop Harry from being terrified of the man who had just bitten a chunk out of a pensioner. Dudley was dragging Harry up and out of the bush open-mouthed and eyes wide.

**"Holy...Who is that?"** Dudley asked as Harry regained his footing and set off in a run, down the long side road which would lead them to the protection of Privet Drive.

**"Run! Just run! Don't look back!"** Harry ran as fast his legs would carry him, leapt the fence surrounding his aunt and uncle's house, almost dislocated his shoulder tearing open the front door and pushed Dudley inside. His aunt who had previously been twitching at kitchen curtains, eyeing the fire across the back garden came rushing into the hallway. She hugged her son tightly.

**"Are you alright? I've been so worried.**" Dudley did not have the energy to shrug his mother off. Harry stumbled into the kitchen and sat down at the dining table trying to catch his breath. His uncle Vernon was standing at the fridge, taking out a large beer. He did not look the least bit affected by the fire.

**"Where have you been boy? You've dragged mud all into the house!"**

* * *

Early next morning Harry was awoken by the phone's loud ringing. Dudley trudged up the stairs and into Harry's room. **"Couldn't sleep either?"** Harry shook his head and sat up. **"There's a girl on the phone for you." **Harry threw off the covers. **"She sounds hot. You never said you had hot friends." **Harry shrugged Dudley off as he tried to listen in.

**"Hello?"**

**"Harry!"** She always sounded so elated to start with. **"I called as soon as I could! Everyone knows about Arabella. It's disgusting! They got so close. Are you alright? They didn't hurt you-"**

**"Hermione. Calm down. I'm fine."**

**"I'm fine too,"** Dudley whispered, smirking, **"Tell her ****_I'm fine_****-"**Harry took the phone away from his ear and pushed his cousin out of the hallway. It sounded as though Hermione was standing on a busy street.

**"Where are you?" **Hermione paused. Harry yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

**"I better not say...but please stay safe, won't you? Promise me."**

**"I promise." **Harry regretted starting off this chain of back and forth promises.

** "I can't wait to see you."** Harry wanted to smile but Hermione still didn't quite sound herself.

**"Hermione, are you okay?"**

**"I'm just worried about you Harry."**

**"Hermione, you're forgetting ****_one_**** vital thing. I defeated Voldemort before I was out of nappies. I'm the potty trained Chosen One, okay?"** Hermione laughed and Harry felt accomplished.

**"Goodbye Harry."**

* * *

As days passed, Harry's birthday approached and the Order made no form of contact, Harry became wracked with worry. He demanded that his uncle Vernon stay home from work. He wouldn't listen and went anyway. Harry did not allow his aunt to go shopping for new clothes to wear on their cruise. Instead she ordered everything in. It was the first time the family had eaten takeout. Dudley was scared by his paranoia but Harry was scared of what was waiting for him outside the moment he came of age. He did not want his relatives to know the kind of things that hunted him. The closer his birthday got, the less Harry slept. A few nights before the 31st, when Dudley was wolfing down Chinese food, there was a knock on the door-the back not the front. Dudley's fork stopped mid journey and was lowered back onto his plate. His aunt Petunia almost dropped her glass. Even his uncle turned his eyes away from the television. Harry drew his wand and approached the door. He opened it to a young man with a beard wearing a leather overcoat with a deep hood. **"Who are you?"** Harry did not even remotely recognise the man on his doorstep. He wasn't sure what he'd expected- Voldemort standing there in the middle of the garden?

**"Wotcher Harry. It's me-Tonks. I'm in disguise because they'll be watching the house," **Came a voice that Harry instantly recognised as hers. It was odd to behold-a woman's voice coming out a terribly manly face. Harry did not let go of his wand and raised her left sleeve just to check that her arm was bare.

**"I'm sorry but who will be watching the house?"** Petunia asked as a bearded stranger ran around her living room closing doors, locking windows, drawing blinds and pulling curtains to.

**"Has anyone new moved into the area lately?"**

**"Yes. A young couple-Esther and Adam-moved into the house on the end there-"**Petunia explained proudly, her thirst for gossip for once paying off.

**"Deatheaters,"** was Tonk's dry reply. Harry tensed, wondering if they had kept Greyback the night Mrs Figg had died.

**"They have my casserole dish!"** Harry couldn't help but smile.

**"Well Harry that's why you're to walk to the park where Remus will meet you while I remain here posing as you so that the lookouts don't get too suspicious. I'm your advanced guard if you will. Letters are too risky these days."** Harry struggled to take in everything she had said as she shed the beard and a few inches of height, her eyes went from blue to green and she pulled a pair of circular glasses from her back pocket with a smirk. His relatives watched in amazement as her appearance rapidly changed until they were staring at a mirror image of Harry.

**"Woah! Can you do that Harry?" **Dudley asked circling Tonks.

**"No! Wait-why are you staying here?"** Harry asked scratching his head. Tonks mimicked his actions as though studying him. Harry shoved his hands into his pockets feeling self-conscious.

**"To avert suspicion. Look Harry,"** Tonks took Harry aside and lowered her voice. **"It's no surprise that the Deatheater's will attack here the second that you turn seventeen-"**

**"****_Friday_****? Death...eaters...want to attack ****_this_**** house on ****_Friday_****?"** Petunia asked falling shakily onto the sofa. Tonks rolled her eyes, annoyed at being overheard.

**"You saw Arabella Figg's house in flames?"** she asked, her hands still on Harry's shoulder. Harry felt odd being stared at by someone who looked exactly like him.

**"Old lady burnt to death-lots of cats. Terrible stink it was. Ruined the look of the..."** Vernon stopped talking as Tonks turned to stare at him incredulously.

**"Well that was the Deatheaters...and if we don't get Harry out of here safely before his birthday, you could all be killed in the attack." **

Faced with a threat on their mortality, Aunt Petunia fell back down onto the sofa, accidentally sitting on Vernon and Dudley's fork dropped onto the table with a clatter.

**"No. They're leaving thursday for a cruise." **Even the Dursley's seemed to have forgotten. After all Tonks had said, Petunia looked a little guilty that she had planned to leave Harry in danger.

**"Just as well then. Harry, is your trunk packed? Put some basics in a backpack or something too."**

* * *

Harry took the stairs three at a time and burst into his bedroom where he tore open his trunk and began throwing clothes from his laundry basket and chest of drawers into its depths, his old schoolbooks, supplies and Daily Prophets went on top. He stuffed some clean underwear and pyjamas, the photo album Hagrid had given him first year and his aunt's album into the old backpack he had tried to leave with weeks before. He fed Hedwig and was excitedly telling her that they were at last getting out of Privet Drive when his aunt quietly slipped into his bedroom with a wrinkled parcel in her hands. It was wrapped in colourful paper with a red bow. **"Need any help?"** she asked tentatively. Harry thought about Tonks, left alone downstairs pretending to be him with his uncle Vernon and Dudley.

**"I'm all done."** His aunt sat down on his bed, smoothing down the sheets with a long stare out of his window. Harry's room was so clean it barely even looked lived in. Harry coughed uncomfortably, his eyes on the parcel and his aunt stood up and passed it into his hands.

**"Since you won't be here for your birthday..."** she said and she left the room again. Harry stared at the parcel in his hands. It felt like clothing of some kind. He had never received an actual birthday present from his relatives and the fact that he was getting one now seemed like a goodbye.

Tonks was the second to enter Harry's room having passed his aunt on the stairs. She closed the door behind her and rushed to the window to draw the blinds. **"Bit early isn't it?"** she asked of the present in his hands. Harry nodded and stuffed the parcel hastily into his backpack. **"Leave me some of your clothes won't you? Need to look convincing."** Harry removed an outfit from his case and left it on the bed, shoes, socks and all. Tonks picked up his underwear with her wand and a bemused smirk.

**"Tonks, can't you be yourself until I have to leave?"** Harry was becoming unsettled talking to himself. Tonks nodded and transformed her face back into the milky white skin, brown eyes and pink hair that was her own. Harry felt put at ease and sat down beside her on his bed.

**"I imagine you've seen enough of your own face in the paper."** Harry slammed his case shut on the crinkled Daily Prophet covers emblazoned with his and Dumbledore's photograph from the ministry after Sirius had died. **"You understand why no one's been in touch?"** Harry nodded but did not mention Hermione's phone-call.

**"Seems like you have the kind of big news you put in a letter."** Harry eyed the moonstone ring on Tonk's left hand and for the smallest of moments she practically beamed.

**"Oh ****_thank you_**** Harry...but you best take this. Harry Potter's not married."** Harry struggled with the idea that he might never be as she slid the ring from her finger and pushed it into his palm. **"Give it to Remus and I'll put it back on when I see him again." **Harry put the ring on the same delicate chain as his mother's whistle, afraid of losing it, making it the third thing hanging close to his heart. Tonks cast her eyes over the locket and the whistle but said nothing about either. **"Dung will be collecting your things in the morning. It's too risky to be doing magic so close to this address with you being underage."** Hedwig gave a low hoot and the television volume was turned back up downstairs.

Seeing Tonks transform into him had reminded Harry of something he had been meaning to ask her all year. **"Tonks...Did you ever have to pretend to be Dumbledore last year?"** On the night of his death Dumbledore had told Harry that he appeared to do other things whilst he was away from the school searching for horcruxes. Tonks hung her head slightly and fiddled with her ring-less hand.

**"Yes I did...and I never really asked why..."** she said sadly. **"All I had to do was sit in the Three Broomsticks or the Hog's Head and have a drink."** Harry thought this had been a risky move on Dumbledore's behalf. If he had known that Draco was out to kill him he could easily have tried to kill Tonks instead. Harry supposed she would easily have been able to defend herself against a desperate schoolboy. **"It was always so easy to have blind faith in him...but now I'm beginning to question whether we were all just taken in by his age and his wisdom-if even he was taken in by it..."** Harry knew by the way the usually long-winded Tonks had to pause that she too had lost sleep trying to unravel Dumbledore's motives for trusting Snape. He didn't know whether this was the right time to share his recently formulated theories with her. **"I haven't been able to get it out of my head...What was the last thing he said to you?"** Harry was taken aback by the bluntness of her question but did not have to struggle to remember.

**"He said 'you swore to obey me'..."** Harry trailed off rubbing sore eyes and Tonks smiled weakly. **"He stunned me up the tower. I wanted to save him-I did."** Harry could not stand the idea that people thought of him as a helpless victim frozen by fear and unable to fight the Deatheaters which had cornered Dumbledore. Tonks nodded and gripped his hand.

**"I know. We all want to help you with whatever he's asked you to do-"**

**"No one else is going to die for me,"** Harry replied gravely. Tonks let go of his hand and stood up, rearranging her features into his and slipping on circular glasses.

**"People die needlessly every day. We just lost Emmeline but this is a war and if it wasn't you, it would be somebody else. I'm willing to go down with our ship, if that's what it takes but it's just like Dumbledore said; 'it's important to fight and fight again, keep fighting' because only then can evil be kept at bay."**

* * *

Harry stared at her feeling suddenly schizophrenic and wishing that he had an alter-ego with such optimism. When Harry said nothing, Tonks started to get changed. Harry pulled on his backpack and his invisibility cloak and followed her downstairs when she looked exactly like him. He watched as she sat down in the chair by the wall and his relatives stared as though they were unsure which Harry they were looking at. Harry hated goodbyes. His relatives raised their eyes from the television as the back door opened and closed and Harry, under his invisibility cloak, stepped out into the night. He walked silently towards the park, the cloak clutched about him as tightly as possible, jumping at every noise and passing shadow. The moment he had rounded the corner into the driveway of no. 4 Privet Drive Harry had seen a light switch on in the house at the corner and the man, Adam's face had appeared in the window, peering out. Harry could barely believe that followers of Voldemort had been living so close to him, watching his every move waiting for his birthday to arrive. He began to wonder about other things-the girl guides who had knocked the day before, the homeless man lying in the alley Harry and Dudley had sped down at the sight of Mrs. Figg's house in flames, the blue haired cat circling the lamp post at the end of the street and the young boys who had been fighting in the park a week earlier. Voldemort had been circling him all summer, silently drawing in...Perhaps these odd previously un-noticed strangers were not only Deatheaters but also Order members. The thought made Harry smile- Kinglsey Shacklebolt in disguise as a girl guide.


	6. Chapter 6 Change of Order

Chapter 6

**Change of Order**

Under cover of his invisibility cloak, Harry practically skipped to the park where he had spent many days and the night of Dudley's birthday. The park was empty save for a teenage boy, Harry didn't recognise, smoking on a bench and a single swing, which was creaking back and forth. Harry was unsettled because there was no wind and no Remus, ready to take him to his friends. He had barely stepped over the threshold onto the worn painted concrete, before he was grabbed forcefully by the hair with a cold hand clamped over his mouth and dragged backwards into a small cluster of trees. The unknown teen stubbed out his cigarette and stood with a hand inside his jacket. Harry struggled for breath, thinking about how the only Order member who had the ability to see through his invisibility cloak was Madeye Moody. There was little chance of him going unsuspected in a children's park. The only possibility seemed to be that Harry had been apprehended by the Deatheaters who had been slowly, circling all summer and would be thrown before Voldemort in a matter of minutes. Harry stopped struggling against the strong hands binding him as the trees disintegrated around him. He would not defeat Voldemort with a splinched wand arm and doubted he would be shown much mercy. The moment his feet hit solid ground, Harry was released but could do nothing for the overpowering wave of nausea which doubled him over. He had only ever apparated side along with Dumbledore and doing so again brought the cave, the inferi, the potion, the fire and the crippling fear, flooding back to his mind.

* * *

His cloak had slipped from around his shoulders and Harry was on his knees, throwing up into the grass. A soft hand patted his back and Harry flinched, his wand thrusting through the air at his kidnapper. Remus Lupin was standing behind him with the offer of a handkerchief. Harry took it and wiped his mouth. **"Put the cloak back on before you get up and stay behind me."** Harry disappeared again beneath his cloak and got to his feet. They were standing in a seemingly endless expanse of marshland, which Harry vaguely associated with The Burrow but the Weasley's six-story home was not sitting central, glowing and welcoming. Nothing but grass and sunset sky stretched on for miles around. Harry followed, but the man leading him was not the same Remus Lupin who had timidly taught him at Hogwarts or moped about Grimmauld Place, not psychically at least. It had been a muscular man who had pulled Harry out of the park and away from danger. He would not have struggled to hold Harry back from chasing Sirius through the veil now. The Remus who had handed him a handkerchief was broader with longer hair and a beard which almost hid his scars from view. He looked like another person entirely. Harry gripped Tonk's engagement ring where it was hanging around his neck wondering if this was all just a manifestation of his recent marriage. In the wake of leaving everything he knew behind, Harry didn't want any of those things to have changed. He longed for the Remus who had protected him from his greatest fears and offered him chocolate on the train; the one who would always be there standing on the sidelines; the father figure that didn't quite dare.

* * *

Harry had been expecting to return to the dank, loveless hallways of his late godfather Sirius's house and Order of the Phoenix headquarters, Grimmauld Place. The marshland made it seem like that would not be the case and Harry was glad. He had had nothing but good times under the Weasley's roof and was looking forward to one more before setting off into the unknown. Dumbledore had also never set foot within The Burrow, so nothing there could remind him of bad things. Of course Harry would have to smell Ginny's perfume, listen to her talking through the walls, see her pink toothbrush in a cup in the bathroom, her clothes hanging on the washing line and perhaps even Ginny herself, sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table but he was secretly thankful for all of that. He hoped that Ginny would allow him a single dance at her brother's wedding too but wouldn't blame her if she refused. Even though Harry couldn't have all of her, he still relished the few opportunities which remained for her to feature briefly in his uncertain and perilous life.

* * *

Remus turned swiftly on the spot, his amber eyes glinting dangerously in the darkness. Harry was sure he spotted the wolf which lay dormant within and clutched his wand tighter still, reminded of the night Pettigrew had returned, Remus had transformed and dementors filled the sky. Remus raised his lit want into the air in an attempt to cut through the enveloping darkness. A cloaked figure descended upon him, knocking him to the ground. Harry instantly thought of Greyback's attack upon Mrs Figg. He was knocked back as others rose up, practically out of the ground and remained safely hidden beneath his cloak, wand drawn and breath caught in his throat. Surrounded by unknown attackers, utterly alone in the middle of nowhere Harry suddenly felt foolish for forgetting to ask Remus any security questions. He backed away from the group with his wand held high and his heart racing. The crouched figure standing over Remus was holding him by the shoulder with his wand to his throat. **"The last words Sirius Black spoke to you!"** When Remus didn't answer, his attacker shook him violently and a cloud of dust rose around them. Remus coughed but did not struggle.

**"Never let Harry cross the lines I did. Hold him back. Show him the way,"** Remus repeated slowly as though those words had taken root in his skin and it hurt to pluck them out. Harry was bombarded with memories of Sirius's final night in the Department of Mysteries and could not stop his eyes from welling up. As Sirius had fallen behind the veil, Remus _had_ held him back and watched as his best friend went to a place neither of them could follow. At the time Harry had hated him but now he understood. Lies had destroyed their friendship and Remus had vowed to do his best to stop history from repeating itself.

**"Where's Potter now?"** Voices were distorted. Faces were hidden. **"What have you done with the boy?"** Harry shrank back into the darkness as quietly as possible, sure that they had been intercepted by Deatheaters. **"Did you sell him out to that animal Greyback?"** He stopped his slow backwards walk as Remus was pushed down into a puddle and pulled out again, dripping.

**"I would...never sell Harry out to anyone. He's the only family I have left!" **Something wasn't right.

**"Then where is he? I knew the wolves had gotten to you! The boy will be in pieces! Kill him-"**A parade would have been thrown in honour of a Deatheater who managed to capture or kill Harry.

**"Show yourself Harry!"** Harry stood still as the attackers swivelled on the spot, staring wildly into the grass. Harry had no desire to show himself to these violent people but he also didn't want Peter to outlive the other Marauders. **"You're safe!"** Harry would go willingly in exchange for Remus's life. He was married in a way Harry would never be.

* * *

Harry drew off his invisibility cloak and Remus's attacker dropped him face first into the dirt. Another took up Remus's lit wand and the smiling face of Order member and highly trained auror Kingsley Shacklebolt was brought forward out of the darkness. Relief swept over Harry as hoods were lowered, their voice distortions lifted and the cheerful faces of what was left of the Order of the Phoenix shook his hand and pulled him into one armed embraces. There were less smiles and hugs than there had been before and Harry found it hard to return them. Many of their number were missing. They had come together as a group of friends and like minded individuals with the aim of fighting against a common cause-to defeat the Dark Lord Voldemort and end his era of oppression under the great leader Albus Dumbledore. With their leader murdered by one of their own, they were hiding behind hoods and fake voices, attacking each other in moonlit fields. When they had rescued him from Privet Drive two summers ago, only Madeye had been so on edge. Now it seemed his paranoia had caught on like cold. It was proof to Harry of how desperate times had become and how desperately he needed to act on them.

* * *

Kingsley tried to help Remus up but he stumbled without help, pushing him away and brushing dirt from his knees. He stood glaring at Madeye as he stood with both hands raised, gruffly whispering a series of things in swift succession. As though a huge curtain had been lifted, the modest Weasley home materialized before them. The usually lopsided sign reading 'The Burrow' had been set straight. The front yard was free of chickens, old boots, rusty cauldrons and garden gnomes. Several tall, white gazebos had been erected beside it, making it clear that wedding preparations were now well underway. **"We'll get back to our posts. Always good to see you Potter."** MadEye clapped Harry on the back and gave Remus an apologetic nod. Harry watched the other Order members walk away and dissolve into the high grass. Remus had carried on towards the house without him and Harry rushed to catch up. As they circled the house two tall figures entered the gazebo, the fabric flap doors fluttering behind them. Harry caught sight of watery blue eyes and a long chalky beard. His heart was beating twice the speed and he poked his head through before he could remind himself that he had watched Dumbledore die. Minerva McGonagall and Aberforth Dumbledore turned to stare at him. Aberforth was like a dirty mirror image of his brother. He had not inherited the same kind eyes and did not seem as happy to see Harry as McGonagall was. **"I'll be with you in a moment Potter."** Remus pulled Harry back out of the gazebo and stared at him and Harry got the sudden impression that he saw another Potter altogether. He manoeuvred Harry into the back garden where the fence had been half painted, the hedgerows trimmed and weeds removed. Even the back door was a brand new shade of blue. It was torn open, bathing the pair of them in orange light and Remus was yanked in by the arm by Bill Weasley.

**"Welcome back."** Harry stepped forwards and smiled but Ron's older brother looked so changed from the first time that they had met that he now found it hard to look at him all. The scars werewolf and Deatheater, Fenrir Greyback had inflicted upon his once handsome face were healing but the fact that he had gotten them fighting for a cause Harry was neck deep in was unbearable to him.

* * *

Both looked solemnly down the back garden. With their scars, Bill and Remus almost looked like brothers but they lacked the comfortable proximity. Remus let go of Bill's hand and took off his cloak. **"No need to look so worried. She's got this and we're all going to be there."** It didn't immediately dawn on Harry that Bill was talking about Tonks. The prospect of welcoming arms had almost caused Harry to forget that he had left Remus's new wife to bear the brunt of an attack upon him and his remaining relatives. Harry took Remus's arm and pulled him down off the step, back into the garden. He pulled at the whistle around his neck, releasing the clasp and Tonk's ring and closing it again, almost strangling himself in his urgency.

**"Let me go back-"**Remus glanced down at the moonstone wedding ring Harry had pressed into his palm, closed his hand and continued on into the house.

**"What's done is done."** Bill picked Remus's travelling cloak up off the floor, hung it on the back of the door and allowed Harry to pass him into the house. Whilst Remus had become a badly executed caricature-bigger but not yet filled in, Bill was thinner, like a second skin of himself with all of the best parts sucked out. He left the kitchen, slamming the back door behind him. Everyone and everything had changed and Harry felt like he was in an alternate universe, though of course he wasn't because he would have had the good sense to choose one in which his parents, Sirius or at least Dumbledore had not died.

* * *

Mr and Mrs Weasley, Ron and Hermione were sitting around the scrubbed, wooden kitchen table staring at him. The tense atmosphere that had existed between Harry, Remus and Bill dissipated at the sight of them. Ron broke into a grin and in his haste to get up and hug his best friend, knocked a drink all over Hermione. Harry smiled ruefully at her over Ron's shoulder as Mr Weasley jumped to her aid with a drying spell. Mrs Weasley was the second to get to him, drawing him in to a fierce bear hug and kissing his forehead with a fond smile. Harry had not had so much human contact all summer. **"Oh Harry! I'm so glad to see you,"** Mrs Weasley said and then began padding at his loose clothing disapprovingly. **"You're thinner every time. Did those muggles not feed you properly?" **Harry dimmed at mention of the Dursleys.

**"Nothing quite like your cooking, Mrs Weasley."** Mrs Weasley smiled widely, her cheeks turning a rosy red. Mr Weasley was much less inviting, merely nodding at him and ushering his wife out of the kitchen and up the stairs, well aware of where he was not wanted. Hermione beamed when Harry finally got the chance to draw her into a tight hug. From her phone calls it was obvious that she had feared that his isolation would have caused him to regress further into the closed, quiet boy she had shared the train home with. Harry remembered just how she had sat opposite him too afraid to say anything and held him as he cried over Dumbledore's chocolate frog card. She knew that Harry was taking Dumbledore's death particularly hard and by the look of her had been worrying herself sick all summer about the Deatheater attacks. She was thinner and taller too. Her skin was tanned and her brown hair highlighted with strips of caramel from the heat of wherever she had been on holiday with her parents. **"You look amazing Hermione."** Ron was taller and broader too and even more than the Order, the Burrow, Remus or Bill the minor alterations in his friends made Harry the most uncomfortable. They were the only two people in the world he had been sure he could depend on never to change and always be at his side. Their being together was simply a natural state of being and even amongst so much ambiguity Harry finally felt at home.

* * *

Hermione went to the stove where a pot of stew and dumplings had been left on the hob. She filled a bowl, took a bottle of chilled pumpkin juice from the cupboard and cutlery from the drawer and returned to the table, placing everything before Harry but he couldn't eat. Sitting there in the Weasley kitchen, as they had done at Christmas, suddenly brought Ginny's absence to the front of his mind. It wafted in like a bad smell and when Ron asked how Harry's summer had been, he instantly thought of Dudley's friend Rachel and felt horribly guilty. **"It wasn't fantastic,"** was all he could say in reply. **"I'm sure yours was better-"**

**"Don't be like that Harry,"** Hermione interrupted his abrupt stream of bitterness, **"You know we would have written to you if we could. Everything has become so uncertain without..."** Hermione uncharacteristically stopped mid sentence, unable to bring herself to say Dumbledore's name. **"I was more than a little surprised when Tonks told me that I best come early for security reasons if I wanted to see you before term resumed."**

**"Did you not think of tell her that we won't be going back to school?"** Hermione looked imploringly down at her hands.

**"I thought perhaps you might have changed your mind."** Harry shook his head. Ron sighed and stared at his mother's clock which bore a likeness of each of her children's faces, none of which were pointed anywhere near 'mortal danger'. Harry lowered his spoon and drained his pumpkin juice.

**"Hermione, I know how important school is to you and I don't want to be the one to ruin that but...after Bill's wedding I'm leaving this place with or without you two. Voldemort and his Deatheaters are going to be after me."** In an attempt to distance himself from them, Harry crossed to the kitchen sink to look out of the window and down the garden. **"If you wanted to go back to Hogwarts, I wouldn't blame either of you. You've got so much more to lose than I have."** Hermione pushed out her chair and came to join Harry at the sink. Bill was pacing past the frog pond and the orchard, wand out and clearly on guard duty.

**"I've got the rest of my life for learning Harry. You need me now."** Ron stayed at the table.

**"As if I need a reason to skip school," **he said light heartedly. **"I don't care about Voldemort or his Deatheaters. Nobody comes between you and me. We've already told you that we're going with you and Gryffindors don't go back on their promises."**

* * *

Hermione took Harry by the hand and led him back to his seat. **"I've been doing my best to prepare but there are only so many books I can take in at once-"**

**"Hermione-"**Harry remembered Hermione's promise at King's Cross to 'burn the books'.

**"I went on holiday Harry and it was a wonderful experience in a beautiful country and I wouldn't trade it for anything but I just felt as though I was biding time and losing sleep,"** Hermione explained.

**"What about you Ron? I'd have to start checking for signs of polyjuice or imperius if you said you'd spent the summer reading and researching."** Hermione and Ron smiled.

**"I've been kept busy with wedding stuff and helping out the Order."** Harry looked up irritated. "**No secret missions mate. I feel like a bloody house elf-making tea and picking up laundry all the time. Don't get me wrong, the house felt a little empty when it was just me, mum and dad and Ginny but bumping into Madeye in the bathroom isn't something I'd wish on anyone."** Hermione giggled and Harry tried to fight that particular mental image.

**"What happened to Grimmauld being Order Headquarters?"** The small Weasley home had been transformed but it was also stretched beyond capacity. Mrs Weasley must have been running herself ragged cooking and looking after so many people in such a small place on top of the many wedding preparations. Harry would do his utmost to help in whatever time remained.

**"Kingsley said it had been compromised because...the secret keeper had died."** Hermione seemed incapable of saying Dumbledore's name. **"When a secret keeper dies, their secret dies with them. Everybody whom they confided in continues to know the secret but can't tell anybody else," **Hermione explained, **"With the secret keeper's death all of those people become the new secret keepers."** Harry struggled to wrap his head around what she was trying to get across.

**"So...all of the Order, who have sworn allegiance to Dumbledore, suddenly can't be trusted?"**

**"It's not that Harry,"** Hermione objected softly, **"It's just that ****_one_**** person he trusted that matters..."** Harry realised that she meant Snape and attempted to discuss him.

**"Did you read about Malfoy? I was thinking that because of the Unbreakable Vow Snape made he'd be dead too-"**

**"Only if that vow involved protecting Malfoy and he never struck me as the protective type**,**"** Ron said resentfully.

**"He'd never be foolish enough to tie his life to another's. It's much more likely that the vow was simply to kill..."** Hermione paused again and Harry wondered just how long she could keep up such selective muteness. **"In which case Snape's still out there-"**

**"Not for too much longer though if I bump into him..."** For all of Harry's verbal spite, a part of him dared to hope that Snape was still on their side so that Grimmauld could return to being Order headquarters and everybody could get out from under each other's feet at the Burrow. Believing in the best of a bad man so that things could return to normal, if only a little bit, seemed like a worthy exchange.

* * *

**"I'm looking forward to getting out of here,"** Ron broke an uncomfortable silence. **"I practically ran out of the door when Dean wrote to Ginny telling her that a bunch of people were getting together to rebuild Hagrid's place for him."** Harry looked away clenching his jaw, sure he might hit someone. Saying goodbye to Hagrid on the platform had been harder than he liked to admit. He wondered if Ginny and Dean meant to get back together but didn't have the heart to ask. **"He loved it-started crying and mopping his face with his beard."** Harry kept staring away and Hermione elbowed Ron.

**"Hagrid said it didn't really feel right without you there."**

**"I guess my invite got lost in the post..."** Harry sighed coldly and Hermione shifted back in her seat. Harry wanted to be happy to have been finally reunited with his friends but they had done as they pleased all summer whilst he had not been allowed; to fix Hagrid's hut or attend Order meetings or stay behind at Privet Drive waiting for the Deatheaters.

**"Harry, don't be unreasonable. It's even easier for Voldemort to get to you now that..."** Hermione stumbled over Dumbledore's name again and Harry felt guilty for snapping at her. He kept forgetting that he was not the only one in mourning. **"We all read about Arabella Figg in the Prophet. He's been closing in on you all summer. Tonks was lucky to get you out of Privet Drive undetected-"**

**"And she'll be even luckier to get out herself! I don't need a lecture alright, Hermione. I saw Mrs Figg go up in flames. I saw Greyback. I threw my cousin back inside that house and I tried to make my aunt and uncle stay in it. Now I've gone and left them there to rot!"** Ron and Hermione stared across the table at him. Harry sat with his head in his arms, assaulted by images of that night and ideas of what the Deatheaters waiting at the corner of Privet Drive meant to do to Tonks and the Dursleys. He was sure that they would be stopped from leaving for their cruise.

**"They're usually pretty glad to be shot of you mate,"** Ron offered in an attempt to ease the tension.

Harry had never shown any kind of emotion towards the Dursleys but contempt. His sudden concern must have seemed out of character to his friends.

**"Mrs. Figg wasn't of any threat to them. She's a squib..." **Harry said at a loss.

**"Deatheaters aren't discriminating when it comes to people they view as inferior to themselves Harry,"** Hermione explained and Harry was reminded again of the attack on the tube station and his muggle relatives and the mercy they would not receive.

"**Tonks has been trained for this kind of thing," **Ron said, seeing straight through Harry's pathetically veiled distress. **"I know she's just clumsy, funny Tonks to us but she ****_is_**** an Auror and a damn good one. She trained under Madeye remember. I'm sure she's seen some things. Your relatives will live to ignore you some more."**

* * *

Harry told them about the 'welcome home' cake, the 'welcome home' argument with his aunt Petunia and the cardboard box. He showed them the fraying photo album and the ornate whistle. Hermione stared at the young Snape in the photograph as Harry spoke about taking in strays and being invited to Dudley's birthday party. **"Do you think I'm an idiot Hermione?"** Her silence was always the most off-putting and Harry wanted to be reprimanded for his slip in will power.

"**Of course not. I think you're right and it was better late than never,"** she said reassuringly.

**"It was easier when they meant nothing to me,"** Harry explained running his hands through his hair.

**"You know you don't believe that,"** Hermione cut across him curtly, folding her arms.

**"Everyone needs their family, especially the people that say they don't need anyone."** Harry lowered his head down onto the table but was reminded of a hung over Dudley and lifted it again.

**"Ron's right. You gave your aunt something nobody else could: another chance. You did a selfless thing. You should feel good about that,"** Hermione said, gripping Harry's hand as he stared into the fireplace. She kicked Ron under the table and he joined in on her efforts to cheer Harry up.

**"Yeah, now she won't feel like she did your mum wrong anymore...even though she made you live in a cupboard and put bars on your-"**Hermione kicked him again.

**"She told me that when I was left on her doorstep I only knew a few words and she had to train me to stop saying one-"**

**"What was it? 'Magic'? 'Quidditch'? 'Wands'? 'Werewolf'? 'Muggles suck'?"** Ron asked, smirking light heartedly.

**"It was 'papa'. That was what I called my dad..."**

* * *

Ron's smirk disappeared and an awkward silence fell. The Weasley's kitchen had always been such a warm, happy, relaxed place and now at the end of July it felt cold and empty. The unhappiness which weighed down upon Harry followed him, infecting everything which was good. He knew that he should have left straight after Dumbledore's funeral and saved himself from all of this. **"Oh Harry..."** Hermione gripped Harry's hand and he burst. He muttered 'muffliato' and told them about his nightmare set in Godric's Hollow. They both listened intently in an even more awkward silence than before. **"You can't allow Voldemort to keep doing this. That walkway has to be sealed. Promise that you'll start practicing Occlumency again."**

**"I don't exactly have anybody to teach me-"**

**"What was Snape doing there?" **Ron asked, swiping the old photograph from under Hermione's arm and glaring at the little boy standing at the sink.

**"It doesn't make any sense. Apparently my grandfather made him promise to take care of mum before they got onto the Hogwarts Express but I guess he's broken a lot of promises now,"** Harry said, **"I can't figure him out anymore."** Ron slammed the photograph down and Harry pulled it back and tucked it inside the album.

**"Hermione's got some theories. Spit them out? I'm sure Harry would ****_love_**** to hear them," **Ron asked, absentmindedly stabbing the tabletop with the end of Harry's unused spoon.

**"I do and ****_theory_**** is all they happen to be,"** Hermione replied smartly, taking back her hand and crossing her arms. Clearly they had argued about this before Harry's arrival. He wondered if Hermione had stumbled across the same conclusions he had about Snape and Dumbledore and Ron had refused to believe them. **"Besides, I don't think that now is the right time to discuss them."**

**"Why not?"** Ron crossed his arms too.

**"Because we're all too angry,"** she declared and Harry nodded in agreement. Ron snorted disbelievingly and threw the spoon onto the floor. **"What I told you doesn't mean that I've forgiven either of them for what they did!"** Hermione spat. The glare she shot Ron was returned with equal force.

* * *

Mrs Weasley came down the stairs into an icy kitchen. She glanced out of the window into the garden and turned to stare at her son. **"Ron! I asked you to bring in the laundry. Won't you go and get it down so you can make up Harry's bed?"**

**"Why do I have to do it?" **Ron snapped and his mother put an authoritative hand on her hip. Harry knew that he was angry at Snape and not his mother but didn't want to get in the middle of another fight. **"Fine! I have to do everything in this damn house. Ginny gets away with murder just because she's a girl. When are we leaving again Harry?" **Mrs Weasley's smile was already strained and when she looked at Harry he dropped his gaze. She disappeared into the scullery wiping her eyes. Hermione picked up the fallen spoon, Harry's uneaten bowl of stew and empty bottle of pumpkin juice. She quickly washed the dish and spoon and binned the bottle with a sigh.

**"What's wrong?"** Harry asked. He was almost glad to be alone with her so that he could try to get to the bottom of her short phone calls.

**"I** **just...wish that Ron knew how ****_lucky_**** he is to have to have both of his parents by his side,"** she said sadly and quietly so that his mother wouldn't overhear.

**"If Ron knew anything worth knowing he wouldn't be Ron,"** Harry said, touching her hand with a smile, she returned weakly. **"And what do you mean? Your parents love you. They're just a letter away." **Hermione coughed and straightened up and rushed to the table, pushing in the chairs.

**"That's right...I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"**Her voice sounded like it was about to break but her face was hidden behind her highlighted hair.

**"You didn't."** Harry had grown accustomed to being an orphan and mentions of it rarely upset him anymore. **"Did you tell your parents you'd be going back to school?"** Hermione shook her head sadly. **"And they were alright with that?"** When Hermione simply shrugged and didn't say anything, Harry wondered just which parts of the wizarding world Hermione had chosen to expose her parents to. They knew about Diagon Alley and Hogwarts but did they know about Voldemort? Did they know that they were wanted dead simply for being themselves? Did they know that Hermione's best friend was Voldemort's number one target? Did they know that if he had to Voldemort would go through Hermione to get to Harry? They couldn't have. If they'd known Harry was the one keeping their daughter from school and a bright future, they would hate him. **"Are you sure you're alright?"** Harry grabbed Hermione by the arm to stop her from cleaning up and allow him to get a proper look at her.

**"I've just missed you Harry."** She quickly threw her arms around him and Harry hugged back clumsily.

**"Honestly, I thought you'd be sick of me by now. My face has been staring at you out of the Prophet all summer."**

**"I know,"** she said pulling away as Ron came through the back door with armfuls of bed sheets and blankets, **"Ginny has them piled in her room."**

* * *

**"McGonagall wants to talk to you in the tent."** Hermione helped Ron with the laundry and Harry stepped out of the back door. Bill watched him from the orchard as he entered the gazebos. They were much larger on the inside just like the tent Mr Weasley had erected at the Quidditch World Cup. The ceilings were strung with lights and the floor was dotted with camp beds and chairs overflowing with blankets, cushions and cloaks. It was clearly being used as a place for the Order members who lived elsewhere to come and go. McGonagall was sitting in the biggest armchair in a sleek black ensemble, holding a feathered pointed hat in her lap. She was still wearing her travelling cloak and a heavy leather doctor's bag was sitting at her side in the grass.

**"Good to see you Potter. How are you?"** Harry was unconvinced by her expression and could only shrug. He wanted to congratulate her on being named Headmistress but it didn't seem appropriate. He was glad that she had not changed but he knew that she was not here for small talk. This was not going to be an easy conversation. **"Sit down."** Harry did as he was told because she had never been the kind of woman you ought to cross. He sat down in the seat beside hers which must have been previously occupied by Aberforth because it was still warm**. "Albus left these in my possession and asked that I deliver them to you."** She picked up the doctor's bag and thrust it towards Harry. He took it only because it seemed heavy and sat with the cumbersome bag in his lap.

**"What is it?"** he asked struggling with the clasp. McGonagall re-crossed her legs and sat up straighter in her chair as the bag popped open with a click.

**"I don't know Potter. It appears only you can open it."** McGonagall was undoubtedly bothered by the fact that the man she had worked for and beside for decades continued to keep things from her whilst sharing them with a child. The bags contents glowed blue with memories. Harry recognised the single vials filled with swirling white threads and felt suddenly confronted by what he had been trying to put out of his mind all summer. Everything he knew about Voldemort was sitting in the doctor's bag in his lap in a wedding gazebo and it wasn't nearly enough.

**"What are you planning to do this September Potter?"** Harry snapped the bag shut. No matter how much his friends longed for familiar surroundings, he could not go back to Hogwarts. He did have much left to learn but none of it involved advanced charms, quidditch strategies or potions finals.

**"I don't know-"**

**"And your schooling?"** It would have been selfish of Harry to return. With Dumbledore gone less remained between him and Voldemort than ever. When Voldemort came for him, Harry did not want it to be at Hogwarts. He refused to taint the school grounds with battle. None of Harry's friends would get the chance to stand in the way of the inevitable fight.

**"I didn't think it would be in the school's best interests for me-"**She laughed but Harry could tell she was anything but amused and became uncomfortable. He was going to get a lecture and felt he'd give in.

"**The school already has a board of governors in charge of determining its best interests Potter. As a child you're a much better suited candidate for a ****_student_****-"**

**"I come of age in three days,"** Harry pointed out offended and McGonagall's stern face softened.

**"You must return to Hogwarts,"** she carried on, sitting forwards in her chair with hands clasped together. **"You would be insulting Albus's memory if you didn't."** Harry kept his eyes on the doctor's bag. As far as he was concerned, he would be insulting Dumbledore's memory if he brought war to his beloved school. He refused to allow anything to jeopardize Hogwart's status as a safe haven. If anything, he wanted to lead the threat away from Hogwarts.

**"I'm just doing as I was told,"** Harry lied thinking that she might accept the idea if she though it had come from Dumbledore himself, **"Every time I don't something bad happens. Sirius can vouch for that-"**

**"Potter, please. Dumbledore never requested that you leave Hogwarts. Without the solace and security the school had to offer none of us would have made it this far. I know that you require closure but when this war is over you are going to need a job and you will not get it without qualifications, famous or-"**Harry switched strategies.

**"Dumbledore told me to accept every possibility and there is the possibility that I...that I won't survive."** Harry had been struggling to come to terms with this realization all summer but somehow the idea that Ron and Hermione would have each other because of him had softened the blow. **"I won't need a job professor."**

* * *

Their conversation was over. Harry had stunned McGonagall into silence. Satisfied, he got up to leave with the clinking doctor's bag in hand. Bill passed the flapping doorway with half of a dark expression. **"Do you think that your parents died fighting so that you could give up, lie down and die at seventeen?"** Harry now knew for a fact that they had done no such thing and he would not be won over by mentions of them.

**"No... I think they'd realise that after all of this time, all this fighting, all of this death that I had the right to make my own decisions about where my life is going."** Harry was not going to waste his only opportunity to be outspoken with McGonagall. She was not his Headmistress, professor or Head of House anymore; no codes of conduct bound them now. **"I have no intention of taking this war lying down, believe me. ****_I am going to Kill Voldemort_**** but that doesn't mean that I'll be coming out of this-"**The prophecy had said 'neither can live whilst the other survives'-they both had to go to finish the war.

**"Potter..."** McGonagall raised a shaking hand towards him. There were tears in her eyes but Harry would not fall for them.

**"No! You're not going to lie to me! Lie to the rest of them. It's what will get them through the day but don't lie to me,"** Harry pleaded. She sniffed loudly into a plaid handkerchief and wiped away her tears. **"People have been dying for me left, right and centre since the minute I was born. It's about time I had a turn."** McGonagall crossed the tent and Harry stood frozen, unsure of her intentions. She drew him into a warm hug before he could refuse. He surrendered himself to the strange, motherly sensation. When she let him go it was with tears rolling down her cheeks. **"Don't cry."**

**"I do not cry out of sorrow Potter but pride. Gryffindor shall certainly feel empty without you."**

* * *

Harry thought of house pride, his sorting coming slowly back to him, specifically the way the Weasley twins had chanted 'We got Potter! We got Potter!' before they had even met him. They had taught him to play Quidditch and lifted him above the crowd when he had won their house the first match of the season. Few of them had actually feared him when the Chamber of Secrets was opened in second year. In third year they had gathered around his bed after dementors caused his worst quidditch injury. Despite the Ministry's attempts to smear his name post fourth year, most of his own house had stood by him and many of them had jumped at the chance to be taught by him in his fifth year. How many of them had cried at the foot of the Astronomy Tower not because their Headmaster was dead but because Harry was sobbing? How many of them would decline their parent's wishes for them to stay home in place of house pride influenced desire to be at his side at Hogwarts this year? Harry could not betray his own like that. **"Know that we're here should you need us. Stay strong out there."** Harry choked up reminded of his mother's last words, his father's battle cry and the fact that Hogwarts was where they had fallen in love and found a place to belong.

**"I'll go,"** Harry said and McGonagall smiled. **"Hogwarts is my home. All of my memories are there-the good and the bad...so should my last. But if there's any danger, any at all-"**

**"Of course, Harry."**

* * *

McGonagall kissed his forehead and left the tent. Harry sank into a chair, unsure whether he had done the right thing. **"Is that what you really think?"** Ron was now standing in the doorway with a dark expression which matched his brother's. Harry quickly got to his feet and made to leave. Ron stood firm, never breaking his gaze, the tops of his ears burning red. **"I can't believe you-"**

**"I thought you'd be happy that we're going back-"**

**"You're only doing it so you can push us away. I know you. You don't even think you're going to come out of **this... If you're going running into battle we want to co-"Ron knew him too well now and pre-empted what was about to come out of his mouth. **"You're going to try and stop us though aren't you?" **Harry shook his head.** "It's not up to you-"**

**"Who lives and dies? Voldemort's made that obvious Ron but I'm not letting him get to you!"** Harry protested loudly, trying to pass Ron and carry on in to the house as the night grew colder still. **"I only want to protect you-all of you. You won't end up like Cedric or Sirius or Dumbledore or my parents...I'd died before I let that happen!"** Cedric had died because Harry was a fool and Sirius had died because Harry was still a fool. Dumbledore had died because Harry was too busy being a fool to notice that anything was wrong. Harry did not think he could bear to lose another person that he loved. **"None of them wanted to die for me either...and I'll be damned if I let any of you..."** Ron placed a hand on his shoulder but Harry shrugged him off. Remus charged past them and into the house as if Harry didn't exist. Harry stormed off into the field with Ron shouting after him. He had done too much talking tonight. He needed to be alone.

* * *

**"Harry, you shouldn't be out here by yourself."** Harry had been sitting, hidden by high grass for less than half an hour when Bill Weasley sat down beside him. He no longer wore his hair in a ponytail but loose, long and messy. Harry suspected it was an attempt to conceal his scars. He had sat down on Harry's right meaning that he could only see the uninjured side of Bill's face and he almost looked normal again. The air was thick with tension and fireflies. Harry was soothed by the silence which was only broken by the sounds of wildlife around them; the frogs in the garden pond, Pidwigeon hooting in the orchard and the occasional bat flapping above. **"I find the fireflies help my thoughts take flight too."**

**"Like what?"** Harry asked, not wanting to seem inconsiderate.

**"Why some have been too badly burnt to believe in the best in others?"** Harry wondered what he meant. Had someone within the Order had the same thoughts as Harry about Snape? Had Dumbledore revealed some truth to them to which he was barred? **"I try to believe that there are two sides to every story-every man and that all are innocent until proven guilty."**

**"Then I don't think there can be many innocent people left," **Harry quipped, clutching the doctor's bag to his side. Bill did not smile.

**"Perhaps not...but even the guilty can be redeemed."** He quickly changed the subject like quilt was something of a sore spot for him. **"I overheard some of your conversation you decide to return to Hogwarts?"** Harry nodded. **"Good-"**

**"But what if Voldemort comes after me? What if people get hurt?"** Harry could not stop himself from blurting out his fears. There was something about the natural silence and the comforting tones of Bill's voice which put him at ease.

**"Voldemort is coming after us all and hurt heals..."** Bill informed him wisely, reaching an arm around his shoulder. **"Even after you have left Hogwarts, it will not leave you. You shouldn't be so willing to trade in your time there, especially if you doubt your chances."** Bill turned his whole face towards him and Harry shuffled away, wishing that he had cast 'muffliato' before speaking so openly with McGonagall. **"Make the best of it."** Bill stood up, looking up at the moon with a frown.

"**Before I get thrown into the adult world of guilty men and redemption?" **Harry retorted and Bill looked down at him nodding. **"I'm already in it."**

**"Then Hogwarts is an escape,"** Bill suggested, **"Take it."**

**"When you were at Hogwarts, did you ever think that it would be like this when you left?"** Harry doubted that anybody he knew had gotten the life they had envisioned at school; not his parents or Ron's, not Snape, Sirius, Remus or even Pettigrew.

**"No. I never thought I'd fall in love. Don't trade that in either. Time is all we have Harry and broken hearts take the longest to heal."**

* * *

Bill offered Harry a hand and they went their separate ways. Bill disappeared beyond the area's protections and Harry went back into the warmth of the house. Harry took a left into the scullery and placed the doctor's bag only he could open behind the unused mangle, covering it with an old blanket. He did not want to be questioned about its contents. He just wanted to go to bed. Ron and Hermione had left the kitchen but the tension associated with the last conversation remained. Remus was tucked into the corner of the sofa in the sitting room, fiddling with Tonk's ring. There was a large glass of brandy on the coffee table. He did not turn to look at Harry. He had no desire to speak to Remus or anyone, quietly picked up his backpack and made his way up the stairwell as quickly and noiselessly as possible. The sound of Ginny's laugh assaulted him on the first floor like a rugby tackle. He had to pass her room to get to the staircase which led to the upper floors of the house. She wasn't doing anything particularly special but seeing her for the first time since Dumbledore's funeral he was terrified that she too would have changed in some way. She hadn't. She was the same beautiful, smiling Ginny, sitting with Fleur and Hermione flicking through fabric swatches and bridal magazines as Fleur braided her hair. Harry wondered just when she had fallen for 'Phlegm's' charms. He also wondered why Fleur was not on guard somewhere. Perhaps Bill felt so badly about what Greyback had done to him that he wished to save his fiancé from the same fate. Keeping her out of the fray was probably an act of love. After competing against her in the Triwizard Cup, Harry knew that even despite her beauty she was a more than capable with but he still found it hard to imagine anyone so feminine and delicate at the centre of any kind of violence.

* * *

The floorboards creaked below him and all three girls looked up. Fleur was quick to leave Ginny's hair, jumping up to grab Harry by the hand and throw her arms around him. She had not changed either. She was still an effervescent blonde ball of passionate French joy. **"Arry! You are safe! 'Ow wonderful it is to see you! I worried you would not make our wedding."** Harry could not tear his eyes away from the small bruise on Fleur's cheek. It was like a mark on the Mona Lisa.

**"What happened to your-"**

**"Oh I am too tall 'Arry: always knocking into kitchen cupboards and 'anging pots. I am a clutz! Is that right, 'clutz'?"** Harry stared over Fleur's shoulder at Ginny nodding as she smiled awkwardly up at him. She did not jump to her feet and hug him as Fleur had done but stayed sitting, surrounded by magazines. Their breakup played on repeat in Harry's head. Having to listen to Fleur talk happily about marriage must have felt like torture. **"'Ave you seen that man of mine?"** Fleur tried to break the silence.

**"He was out on guard. I thought you would be too-"**

**"No...Bill would not allow eet. I 'elp 'ow I can. I make ze tea an' I talk to Molly-learn things wives an' mama's 'ave to know."** Harry smiled. Being around the Weasley's would make anybody long for a family of their own. Fleur would make a loving and attentive mother some day. Hermione got up and stepped out into the hallway. Her hair had been plaited in places too. Harry reached for one smirking and stroking a hand through her hair.

**"You spoke with Professor McGonagall-Headmistress McGonagall?"** Harry nodded. His brain felt tired and fuzzy. **"Where does she stand?"** Hermione's brow furrowed anxiously

**"Under the same castle roof we will all year."** Hermione squealed and wrapped her arms around his neck. Harry knew very little about Hermione's life before Hogwarts but most people found sanctuary within its walls and Harry had never considered that he would be taking that away from her. Surely there were books in the library she had yet to check out...twice. Harry avoided Ginny's gaze and unravelled himself from Hermione.

**"I really need to go to sleep."** His foot hit the first step of the second staircase when Ginny's voice reached him.

**"Don't I get a hug now?"** Harry was sure he felt his heart break and turned to find Ginny standing behind him. He did not want to get close enough to smell her citrus shampoo or feel her soft skin against his. He practically fell into her arms. It had only been a month since they had seen one another but it felt like a lifetime and Harry never wanted to let her go**. "I'm still your friend."** Harry opened his eyes and drew away from her. A friend was all Ginny could be now. If Voldemort sought him out at Hogwarts, he would find no loving girlfriend there as an easy target to attack. Harry had saved her from Voldemort once before and would continue to do so by pushing her away.


End file.
